


A Really Good Detective Never Believes In The Supernatural

by oschun



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 05:54:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8359804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oschun/pseuds/oschun
Summary: Sequel to A Really Good Detective Never Gets Married





	

Ellen kicks the apartment door shut behind her, right hand clutching a heavy briefcase, left arm crushing a loaded grocery bag to her chest. 

The bottom of the bag has split open and there’s a six-pack of beer slipping out of her fingers where she’s trying to hold it together. Dropping her keys onto the hallway table finally upsets the careful balance of limbs and objects, and the six-pack falls to the floor in a crashing promise of fizz. 

“Shit!” she hisses in irritation, acknowledging that she probably shouldn’t have been so coldly dismissive of the new doorman when he’d offered to help her a couple of nights ago. Since then, he’s been watching her struggle with the usual load of crap she carries home, a scared-rabbit look on his face like she might arrest him for all the petty little crimes he’s ever committed. She has that effect on people sometimes, although she’s normally more adept at using it to her advantage.

It’s a little childish, but she’d been surprisingly upset about Lewis, the old doorman, retiring, so she’d taken it out on the new guy. 

Lewis was at the door for years, her constant. His grandfatherly reprimands about the pile of work in her arms and constant lateness was like crossing the threshold from the city outside to something more familiar, something closer to the small town she’d grown up in. 

Twenty years in the city, one of a small and select group of female officers who’d managed to break through the brass ceiling to the rank of captain, and she still can’t get rid of that inherent hick-girl, that small voice inside her that questions whether she’s up to the job, whether she’s good enough, strong enough.

She dumps the groceries on the counter, unbuckles the Glock strapped to her ankle and places it next to the swollen six-pack.

There are five messages on her home phone: nobody that she has any interest in returning their calls, least of all her mother complaining about the side effects of new medication and lack of care at the expensive nursing home that swallows a large chunk of Ellen’s salary every month. The plaintive, whining-voiced message sets her teeth on edge and settles claustrophobic guilt on her shoulders, so much like the unwanted sweaters her mother forced her to wear as a kid, even in warm weather. 

As a little girl, Jo never wore shoes or a sweater if she didn’t want to. Ellen had made sure of that, regardless of the whispered comments from other, better mothers. 

Tiredness weighs heavily on her. It’s been a long day. She takes a shower, allowing the hot spray to beat against the back of her neck where the muscles are tightly knotted. Supper is a microwaved TV dinner, something from the gourmet section proclaiming it to be a new and improved recipe. She might as well have picked something up from the pet food aisle. Ellen scrapes most of it into the trash, opens a foaming can of beer over the sink and settles on the couch with a stack of case-files from her briefcase.

First one is a factory owner who is supposedly in the dog food business but clearly has organized crime connections through his fleet of trucks that transport more than Fido’s Favorite across state lines. The case landed at their doorstep when the bodies started turning up. She’d put Dean and Henriksen on it. They’d started processing, going slow, not wanting to work too hard because they knew that the Feds would show up and take it off their hands. No point in doing the G-men’s jobs for them. 

The file has post-it notes attached on each page. Neat, precise handwriting: Henriksen’s. Dean’s handwriting is worse than a doctor’s script. She notices the small, crude drawings in the right corner of each note, obviously meant to read like a flick book, and resists it for all of two minutes. 

The edges of the notes are curled over but the simple narrative is obvious. A stick policeman chases after what Ellen supposes is meant to be a dog, although it mostly resembles a sheep. He is, in turn, chased by a suited stickman identified with an arrow as Mr G-man. Dog runs away and stick policeman bends over to get fucked from behind by the smiley-faced G-man. 

Ellen laughs out loud and shakes her head. Dean. Always the juvenile cynic. Even without the artist’s signature at the end, she’d recognize the pictorial commentary as belonging to him. 

Only Henriksen, who has the patience of a saint, could have been partnered with Dean this long without literally killing him.

Dean drives her nuts, professionally and personally. He is simultaneously the best and worst detective she has on the force. His cocky arrogance, reckless disregard of the rules and public flouting of her authority frequently force her hand, make her come down hard on him when she’d actually be willing to let a lot of things slide. He’s incredibly good at the job, even though he’s mostly doing it with a hangover and generally pissing off everyone around him. 

If she’s honest, she doesn’t really hold it against him that he left Jo. She’d seen that coming from the start, had tried to warn Jo. But when did warnings ever have the desired effect on her stubborn-as-a-mule daughter? 

It’s because you let that girl run wild, her mother’s voice reminds her. 

Better than trying to crush her spirit, Ellen silently replies, unrepentant.

Anyway, she’d been on shaky ground warning Jo off Dean. Ellen isn’t completely blind to her own hypocrisy. 

Jo has her stubbornness, her capacity for self deception. The truth is that nothing good ever came from a Harvelle woman getting mixed up with a Winchester man. 

How many times had Ellen told herself to keep the hell away from John Winchester and his damaged, passionate intensity? 

Their relationship had been a twisted knot of complications from the start: an on-again, off-again thing for years that eventually settled into something that might be called a full-blown affair a few months before his death.

It would’ve burnt itself out in time. They were too similar—too hard-headed and fiery-natured—for it to last. And the job always impinged on their private lives. The last thing either of them had needed was to fall for another obsessed, work-driven cop. 

It’s probably because the relationship didn’t reach its natural conclusion that she feels this desperate ache of emptiness when she thinks about him. 

Maybe she’s actually better off that it worked out the way that it did. Ellen knows that she would have come out of it worse off than him. She’d decided a long time ago that John was incapable of really loving someone else, forever wedded as he was to the perfect memory of his dead wife. 

She refuses to carry him in the same way. She didn’t do it with Bill. She won’t do it for John Winchester. 

It’s partly why she’s more forgiving of Dean’s asshole behavior than she’d normally be with anyone else. She understands what it means to fight against that orbiting of a powerful personality, how hard it is to make your own way when you’re constantly defined by the gravity pull of another. 

Ellen has a feeling, though, that Dean is being pulled in a very different direction lately. 

She remembers the day when Sam Campbell stormed into the precinct, tall and angry and adamant that Dean was in danger, an obviously accustomed self-assurance unravelling beneath his desperate fear for Dean’s life. She’d recognized straight off that here was a match for Dean in a way that Jo could probably never have been, despite her stubborn, sassy strength. 

Ellen had known that Dean was hooking up with men after he and Jo got divorced. Of course. It’s virtually impossible to keep that kind of thing quiet in the tightly-knit, watchful world of the precinct. She doesn’t have a problem with it, hopes that Dean will manage to find some happiness. He deserves it. He and Jo just didn’t work together. It’s nobody’s fault. Harvelles and Winchesters are a combustive combination and not meant to be. Also, Gabe won’t suffer any long-term effects from the break-up of his parents’ marriage. In his own way, Dean is a good father, even if he doesn’t believe it. 

Ellen rolls the post-it notes into a ball, throws it across the room, a neat arc straight into the trashcan and works through the files for a couple of hours, mentally memo-ing herself to kick Kowalski’s ass tomorrow for his sloppy paperwork. She wishes the guy would just retire already and put everyone out of their misery. 

Finally, she turns her attention to the faded red file on the coffee table next to her. It’s been in the periphery of her vision, of her thoughts all night. 

There seems little point in re-reading something that she could quote verbatim anyway. Of course, half of the reports and case-file notes have her signature at the bottom of each page, but they’re also dated sixteen years ago and she has investigated thousands of cases since, many of them more memorable, more horrifying than this one. But there was something about this case that left its mark on her, that stained her in some permanent way. 

Llewellyn Jackson started killing children in the early summer of ’94. He’d lure them away from parks and playgrounds, then he’d drive them to his house where he’d wrap a clear plastic bag over their heads and suffocate them. There were six disappearances in as many months. They eventually tracked him down to an address and found the half-dozen bodies in his basement, little boys and girls propped up in a row against the wall, the bags still over their heads, not a mark on them from the neck down. 

They set up surveillance teams but Jackson never came home, never went back to work, stepped out of his life and disappeared like he’d never really existed. 

Nothing about the case made any sense. There was no explosive trigger to explain his behavior, no hidden detail in his background that suggested a gradual lead-up to some sort of final breakdown, no escalation in his psychosis, no sublimated acting out of rage or pain or any other messy human emotion. 

She remembers watching an FBI profiler in a room full of jaded cops trying to place Jackson in the box of Sociopath—those renegade humans that, through nature or nurture, are without the essential qualities of humanity—but even that didn’t really fit. There was nothing cold or clinically violent in Jackson’s actions, no curious, detached sense of I like to see people with their insides on the outside. The way that he stole the life-breath from his victims and then arranged their bodies like empty, discarded containers in the basement suggested something not only without malice but almost without interest, as if it didn’t matter. 

There had been a silent moment before the room emptied when every single person there acknowledged that they had absolutely no idea what this was or how to explain it, including the smooth-faced profiler. 

The press made a big deal out of Jackson’s vague interest in the occult, made it sound like they’d found all kinds of Satan-worshipping paraphernalia in his house. There was no real truth to it. Ouija board in the cupboard and a couple of occult texts on the bookshelf don’t a Satanist make. 

But there had been something in that basement. 

She struggles to define it, even now, after years of considering and reconsidering her memories of that day.

She was the first cop on the scene, the first to enter the basement. Slow, wary steps, her gun drawn, down a home-made wooden staircase that led to a seemingly ordinary room being used for storage. The image is still so clear in her mind: the way the dust motes had paused in suspended animation in the afternoon light slanting through a pair of narrow windows over cardboard boxes, a girl’s pink-ribboned bicycle, furniture belonging to long-dead relatives. All that accumulation that nobody wants or needs but that they can’t bear to get rid of. 

Dread had started creeping up her spine long before she’d seen those small bodies amongst all that commonplace junk. Something seemed to reach up from the room beneath her to wrap its cold, clammy hand around her throat, pulling her down into it.

There had been a presence in that room with her, something other, alien and incomprehensible. She’ll never forget the sense of it. 

Six months later the cops in Virginia caught a guy who’d been killing ten year olds and leaving their bodies in the woods, seated and propped up against trees with clear plastic bags over their heads. 

Similarities in the cases being what they were, and taking into account the fact that Jackson had grown up in Virginia, she’d flown out with her partner at the time. 

It wasn’t Jackson but another guy so uncannily similar that it might as well have been. 

Jonathon Roberts was living an ordinary life before some invisible switch flipped inside him. His family had been uncomprehending and open-mouthed with horror the opening day of the trial, a crowd outside baying for his blood as he stood in the dock with dead eyes, distracted, like he wasn’t really there.

Roberts’ lawyers went for the insanity defence, citing his ordinary, law-abiding existence up to that point as evidence for a sudden psychotic breakdown. His cold, composed demeanour in court hadn’t helped their argument. Until the third day into the trial when he’d unaccountably started rocking in his seat, chanting something under his breath and scratching at his throat as if he had really bad eczema, blood seeping into the collar of his shirt. His mother had become hysterical and started shouting That’s not my son across the room over and over. She had to be sedated and carried out of the courthouse on a stretcher. The press descended like a swarm of flies.

The whole thing turned into a circus and they’d gotten out of there as soon as they could. 

The insanity plea didn’t go anywhere and Roberts was given the death penalty. He spent fifteen years on death row. Ellen followed the various appeals over the years. Three weeks ago his final appeal had been overturned and he was executed at 10:15 on a Monday morning.

A strange sense of anticipation had hung over her all that day. 

It had been really cold. The kind of winter’s day when the sky is slate-grey and everyone looks pale and indistinct in the half-light. She was making her way home when she’d felt a prickling sensation across the back of her neck and shoulders. Turning around, she’d seen Roberts on the corner of 7th and 23rd, actually seen him there, standing motionless in the grey light and staring at her through the throngs of people rushing to get home out of the cold, like they were the only two people on the crowded sidewalk. 

Of course, it had been her imagination, the product of stress and overwork. Still. She’s taken to wearing the Glock on her ankle again like a security blanket. She hasn’t felt the need for it in a very long time. 

For her, the Roberts case was always inextricably linked with Jackson’s, the one that got away when she was a hot-shot rookie detective, that nagged at the back of her mind despite the number of cases she’s closed since then. While she was in Virginia, she’d discovered that Jackson had known Roberts when they were kids, a tenuous link that didn’t explain anything about their murderous adult impulses. Trying to connect the two cases was probably just the result of her desire to make sense out of random coincidence, the desire to impose order on a senseless world. It’s just that stubborn part of her that refuses the closure of Roberts’ execution, the acceptance of Jackson’s disappearance. 

She needs to let it go. Ellen knows that. The faded red folder gets locked back into her desk drawer. 

Placing it under lock and key doesn’t prevent it from following her into her dreams. 

Sheets of opaque plastic hanging in a room, ceiling to floor. A child crying out from behind them as she desperately tries to shove those synthetic barriers out of her way, lost and turning around in circles. Shadowy figures just out of reach. 

She wakes up covered in sweat, her heart trying to hammer its way out of her chest. It’s two in the morning when she finally gives up on getting back to sleep and returns to the files. Another detective makes it onto her ass-kicking for shoddy paperwork list.

 

***  
“Man, you’ve got it bad.”

“What? I’m going out to get something to eat. What are you talking about?” Dean aims for casually defensive as he clears his desk.

“Uh huh. Sure you are,” Henriksen smirks at him, leaning back in his chair and giving him an arched-eyebrow look.

“If you’re feeling lonely, Vic, you can tag along. Although you’ve gotta know that it’s not healthy to be attached to my hip. You need to have your own life, Partner.”

“That’s okay,” Henriksen drawls. “You go to lunch on your own. I don’t want to be a third wheel. And you know I’m not into that kinky threesome shit.”

“The invitation to lunch didn’t extend to a threesome,” Dean replies dryly. “Anyway, what makes you think I’m going to be having sex for lunch?”

Henriksen laughs. “Oh, something about the way you started fidgeting and watching the clock from about 12:30, maybe the tenting in your pants.”

“Fuck you, Vic. There is no tenting. Stop fixating on my crotch.”

“I think you’re actually in love, Winchester. Anybody who manages to regularly distract you from your stomach must be a keeper.” 

“You know that perp who tried to punch you last week? The six foot built-like-a-brick-shithouse that I saved your ass from? I wish I hadn’t tried so hard.” 

Henriksen just laughs louder as Dean walks out.

Okay, so he’s got it bad. Sam is under his skin, burrowed deep. Dean admits it. Not out loud, of course, and definitely not to Henriksen, but quietly in that part of his mind where he can’t lie to himself.

It’s been about six hours since he saw Sam this morning and here he is incapable of making it through the day without getting another fix. He’s becoming dependent, some kind of addict. It’s slightly embarrassing. 

They’d showered together after stumbling out of bed this morning. The water too hot, a spray of burning needles against their skin, the way Sam likes it. Sleepy, watery making-out edging into something more frantic, desperate. Soapy fingers inside him and a slick grip on his cock making him come humiliatingly fast. The heat and steam from the shower and Sam’s deep, hard thrusts almost buckling his legs under him. At one point he’d thought that he might actually pass out, heart racing, not enough air in his lungs and too much blood pounding through his body.

It’s hard to concentrate on anything else when Sam is this distracting, drowning influence on him. 

He picks up sandwiches from the pretentious place opposite Campbell’s—gritting his teeth at the price when the cashier rings it up—and heads across the street, anticipation licking at his skin. 

An addict, that’s what he is. 

There’s something about the warm church-light from the stained glass window, the smell of books and reflective quietness of the bookstore that is so essentially Sam. That other part of him that Dean never feels like he has full access to. 

As he pauses to let the atmosphere of the place soak into him, Liam, a kid who used to live at the shelter and now works part-time at Campbell’s, leads a wealthy, middle-aged couple weighed down with books past him to the door. He closes it behind them and turns to Dean, obsequious salesman smile replaced by a knowing one as he nods towards the store-room upstairs. “He’s working through lunch. Probably needs the break.” He looks Dean over with an expression that is way too old for his smooth features.

“Quit looking at me like that, jail-bait. I just brought him lunch.” 

Is he seriously this transparent?

“Sure you have,” Liam smirks. “And just for your information, I’m one hundred percent legal. Have been for a while now.” 

The hard, assessing edge lying just beneath Liam’s pretty-boy exterior has bothered Dean from the moment he first met him. Liam comes from money, is intelligent, articulate and privately-schooled. Little rich boy abandoned by his parents to drugs, the predators out there, and eventually to the cold, dark streets and the inevitable places that lead from them. A thin scar runs down from his hairline, over his cheekbone and cuts just under his earlobe, marring the perfect veneer of his features. There’s a story behind it that Dean doesn’t want to hear. 

He doesn’t know how Sam deals with these kids. There’s something about all that crystallized childhood hurt beneath an adult mask, an inner deadness, which strikes Dean as a lost cause. Call him cynical, but he knows that Liam is on a one-way road, despite the efforts of people like Sam.

“Do you want a sandwich?” he asks.

“I’m watching my weight,” Liam replies and walks away.

Dean sighs and makes his way upstairs. 

Sam is leaning over a desk in the narrow store-room, filling in paperwork and surrounded by teetering towers of books. Dean admires the view afforded by the taut material stretch of his pants before stealing up behind him and smacking him on the butt. 

Sam startles and knocks over a pile of books on the table as he quickly twists around. “Dean! For God’s sake! Don’t creep up on a guy like that.”

“Now what kind of a cop would I be if I couldn’t sneak up on people? I brought you lunch.” He drops the bag of sandwiches on the desk, grips Sam by the arms and backs him up against the wall. He pulls Sam’s hand up between them and presses it against his crotch. “Here it is.” 

Sam’s lips twitch in amusement as he leans back against the wall and arches his eyebrows. “Wow, you are one suave smooth-talker, Winchester. I’m just waiting for the line about me being vegetarian but only because I haven’t tasted what you’ve got to offer.”

Dean snorts and leans forward to gently bite Sam’s bottom lip. “I don’t want to spoil you with my best lines all at once. Gotta keep something in reserve, you know. But if you’re offering…”

Sam’s lips curl up into a slow smile, dimples deepening in a way that always drives Dean to distraction. He cups the back of Dean’s neck and whispers maybe against his mouth before pulling him into a wet, open-mouthed kiss, his other hand still between Dean’s legs and slowly starting to knead him into hardness. 

Dean groans and lowers his head to nudge aside the collar of Sam’s shirt so that he can suck a hard kiss onto Sam’s collarbone. “You drive me crazy,” he whispers into Sam’s ear. “All day I’ve been thinking about you. This morning in the shower. Fuck. Nobody—” he hesitates over the words. Fuckit, he might as well say it, it’s the truth. “Nobody has ever made me feel like that.” He doesn’t mean to let his voice come out quite that rough.

Sam pushes him away and Dean’s breath catches at the look on his face. This is how it is between them. Sam doesn’t reply, just yanks at Dean’s belt, frantic hands fumbling at the buckle and zipper so that he can pull Dean free of his boxers, his hand a rough and tight-fisted grip on him. 

Dean steadies himself with one hand against the wall next to Sam’s head, closes his eyes and pushes his hips into that hard pressure. 

He’s starting to lose it, disappearing into that no-man’s land that stretches brief and raw before release, but stops himself in time and pulls Sam’s hand off him. “No,” he says hoarsely. “Put your hands against the wall.”

Sam looks back at him, heavy-lidded and bewildered. His hair is tousled and hanging in his face. Dean strokes it back and tucks the soft strands behind his ears, leaving his face open and exposed. “At your sides. Put your hands against the wall.”

Sam’s eyes widen, something dark and hungry flickering at the back of them. He does what Dean asks, palms flat and open next to him as he leans back against the wall, his head slightly to the side and throat vulnerable, eyes on Dean.

Dean gets Sam’s pants and underwear off him, hears the keys or something in his pocket clink against the floor as they drop to his ankles. 

He lowers his eyes to take in Sam’s arousal, hard and arching up between them. Dean starts stroking him and Sam’s mouth drops open, his breath coming in shallow pants, hands clenching at his sides. 

Dean doesn’t know where to keep his gaze: on Sam’s flushed face or lower where his hand is moving slow on Sam’s erection. Eventually, he’s riveted by the expression on Sam’s face and can’t look away from the way he’s coming apart. “Fuck,” he exclaims and moves forward to fit his cock next to Sam’s. Rough, uncoordinated movements until they’re both groaning and pulsing wet over Dean’s hand. 

Dean sags against Sam, face hidden in his neck, and Sam turns his head to whisper hot-breathed words into his ear that feel like they travel into his body to fill him with sunlight. Yeah, he thinks, knowing that the words aren’t empty and just in the moment. 

“Yeah,” he says aloud against the warm skin beneath his lips, his heart unfettering itself to float loose and free in his chest. 

They manage to untangle themselves and stare at each other for a couple of silent moments. It’s been leading up to this. And here it is. They look at each other, acknowledging it.

The moment’s too heavy, too weighted with significance. “So, I think we might’ve jizzed on that original Puritan tract on the floor next to you there, Sammy.”

Sam gives him a knowing look. He doesn’t call Dean on the emotional avoidance, just smiles and says, “Only Ginnie gets to call me Sammy, Dean. And if you ever jizzed on my Boston originals, I would have to kill you, you heathen barbarian.”

“Yeah, yeah, book boy, don’t get yourself all worked up. It’s not like you’re ever going to be able to take me with those I’m-at-one-with-nature moves. My money’s on the tough street cop over the yoga man.”

“Wanna bet?” Sam asks, his voice low and dangerous.

Dean laughs and ignores the heat that flares up his body in favor of rearranging his clothes in some semblance of order, checking for wet spots. “Later. I have to get back to the precinct. Henriksen is becoming the smuggest son of a bitch on the planet. I can’t be late.”

“You’re like an old married couple,” Sam replies, doing up the buttons of his shirt and grimacing when he notices that one is missing. 

Dean smirks at the dark look Sam gives him. “It’s a marriage of convenience, or more precisely, of necessity. You don’t have to be jealous. It’s over there,” he points to the button under the desk.

“Do you even know how much this shirt cost?” Sam asks, fingering the ripped, fraying buttonhole. “Victor loves you. I’m not jealous. We’re in a very, very small fraternal minority.”

“Probably more than what I earn in a month,” Dean answers. “He’s a pain in my ass is what he is. And it’s really irritating the way the two of you gang up on me.” 

The first time the three of them had gone out for a drink together, Dean had been as nervous as a kid bringing home his first boyfriend. Sam and Henriksen had proceeded to get along like the proverbial burning house and had pretty much ignored him all night, except to make jokes at his expense. 

There’s a knock at the door and then Liam’s head appears from behind it. “You decent in here?” His eyebrows arch at the picture they make. “Lunch, huh?” he asks Dean with a dirty leer.

Dean gives him a cool look and doesn’t bother denying the obvious. 

“Your Angel guy is on the phone,” Liam says to Sam. “He wants to know about the book launch.”

“I’ll call him back.”

“Angel guy?” Dean asks after Liam leaves.

“This writer I’ve known for a while. I’m promoting his latest book on Angel lore,” Sam replies. “Are you going to have a sandwich before you go?”

“Nah, I’m going to head back. Food was just a pretext for seeing you.” 

“You don’t need a pretext, Dean.” 

If he smiles, he’s going to look like a complete dork so he purses his lips and squeezes Sam’s arm. “I’ll see you tonight.” 

“You make my day,” Sam says quietly behind him.

Dean turns to smirk at him. “That’s because, despite all your intellectual refinement, you really just want to be fucked against a wall by a heathen barbarian.”

Sam’s laugh follows him out the door.

 

***  
Dean spots the bulge of the Glock at Harvelle’s ankle during her morning briefing the next day. “You notice how on edge Harvelle’s been lately?” he whispers quietly to Henriksen next to him.

Henriksen nods and leans closer. “Heard her on the phone the other day talking to a guy down at Waverly in Virginia about an execution. When I went in to talk to her about the organized crime case, I swear she never heard a word I said. She was acting really weird.”

“Who’s the guy that got fried?”

“Jonathon Roberts. He got locked away back in ’95 for abducting and killing a bunch of kids. A random serial thing.” 

“Eavesdropping on our Captain’s phone conversations and snooping, huh? Very smooth, Vic.”

“That’s really funny coming from the most suspicious man I’ve ever met. Find anything interesting in your background check on that guy Jo’s been seeing?”

“Touché, Partner.”

Harvelle finishes the briefing and both of them notice the dark smudges under her eyes as she walks past them to the door.

“Something’s definitely up with her.” 

“Yeah,” Henriksen agrees. “She hasn’t threatened to can you for at least a week, too. She’s distracted by something. It’s your turn to put the coffee on,” he says, getting up.

“I don’t make it good like you do, though.” 

Dean doesn’t know why he bothers; whining hasn’t worked on Henriksen since his daughter learned to talk. He sighs and makes his way to the small kitchenette to fight with the space-age coffee-maker that somebody thought would infinitely enrich their working lives. 

The first couple of hours of their shift are taken up with paperwork and then a call comes through about a body dumped in an alleyway. 

Dean’s learned not to be surprised by anything that meets him at a murder scene, but this one knocks him a little sideways. There isn’t much that would cause him and Henriksen to stand here, wooden and wordless. Between the two of them they’ve pretty much seen everything there is to see of the horrors that human beings are capable of inflicting on each other. 

“Fuck!” Henriksen hisses. Dean can feel the affronted rage vibrating off him. 

“Yeah,” he mutters and turns to see Harvelle ducking under the police tape. “What’s she doing here?” 

They watch Harvelle briefly question the patrolman who was first on the scene. She walks over to them afterwards and looks at the body propped up against the grimy, graffitied wall next to a dumpster. 

It was once a little girl in a flowered winter dress and white woollen tights dirty at the knees. Now it’s just a rag doll thrown away with the trash, her eyes wide and glassy behind the clear plastic bag that covers her head.

It’s because Harvelle is standing so close next to him that Dean feels her full body shudder. Her expression is tight and shuttered when he turns to look at her. He’s about to say something, mouth opening and then snapping shut when she abruptly walks away. He thinks she’s making her way over to talk to a CSI but then she veers off and half-turns away from them to throw up against the wall.

“Jesus!” Henriksen exclaims in astonishment. 

Dean is next to her in a couple of quick strides, placing his body between her and the open-mouthed cops behind him. His hand twitches at his side to place it on her back or shoulder, but knowing Harvelle, she’d probably reach for the gun at her ankle and shoot him if he tried, so he just stands there next to her, shielding her from prying eyes as she empties her stomach.

“Wish I was the kind of guy that carried a hanky,” he says when she stands back up again and wipes the back of her hand across her mouth. “Want to use my sleeve?”

“I’m fine.” She’s pale and sweating, anything but fine.

“We all do it,” he reassures her. 

No, they don’t. That first murder scene, the first autopsy, maybe, but after that they learn to hold it down and get on with the job. Only rookies and the ones who aren’t going to make it past the first year puke at a scene.

“Don’t condescend to me, Dean. A bad breakfast burrito, that’s all it is.” Her voice is clipped but it’s at odds with the sheer veil of vulnerability that briefly hesitates over her face. Dean’s only seen it a couple of times in the years that he’s known her. 

“Want to get a coffee?”

“I said I’m fine. Do your job, Winchester.” 

He watches her walk away, steady steps that betray nothing. 

“Is she alright?” Henriksen asks him. 

It’s a question echoed by a sniggering CSI. “What’s up with Hard-ass Harvelle? She’s too old for morning-sickness, right?”

“Don’t you have something more important to do than stand around shooting your mouth off?” Dean snarls at him. 

The CSI gives Dean a dirty look as he goes back to his evidence collection.

Henriksen has a smile playing around the corners of his mouth. “You know, Dean, at heart you’re actually an old-school gentleman.” 

“Whatever,” Dean mutters. “Let’s get to it.”

They work the scene and interviews until they get word that a couple have turned up at the precinct, panic-stricken because their daughter has disappeared from school. She fits the victim’s description. 

The car ride is silent. They’re both preparing themselves. Dealing with the suffering that follows in the wake of a death, especially of an innocent, is the most difficult part of the job. 

Interviewing the parents starts the tight squeeze of a tension headache at Dean’s temples. 

Her name’s Daisy MacDonald and she was nine years old. The parents are unhelpful, alternating between staring into the middle distance as they replay the details of their morning in answer to his questions and the repeated horrified realization that they are never going to have another morning like it. 

Daisy disappeared from her private elementary school during recess. Dean takes the school. Henriksen gets Ash and the autopsy. 

The principal at the school is professional but clearly distracted by the media fallout and parental outrage that is about to land on her head. The staff who were watching the kids at recess are hiccupingly tearful and full of report-card information about what a good girl Daisy was. A sweet, clever, beautiful girl, well-loved by all. Dean filters out the unnecessaries, hears what he needs to (she wasn’t being abused; dropped off and picked up by either the nanny or the mother; nanny’s been with the family for three years; virtually impossible for the kids to get out of the school or for anyone else to get in) and tries to elicit the specifics that the most helpful witnesses are often the worst at providing. 

He leaves the school unsatisfied and with little to go on. 

Campbell’s is on the way back to the precinct. Dean stops because he needs coffee and the warmth and light of Sam’s presence to chase away some of this darkness gathering in his head. 

Sam is standing on the narrow book-shelved balcony that half-encircles the lower floor of the bookstore with a guy in a suit and trenchcoat. Something about the way they’re talking together makes Dean pause to watch them. The other guy’s probably in his early 30s, slim, good-looking, his hair spikily tousled in a way that’s meant to look uncontrived, and he’s standing really close to Sam, right in his personal space. 

Sam throws his head back and laughs at something he says. Dean watches the guy in the trenchcoat lean even closer to direct another remark intimately close to Sam’s ear. Sam laughs louder and reaches out to teasingly swat him on the arm. 

Dean clenches his hands in his pockets. His fists turn to hardened stone when Sam leans over to pull out a book from the shelf next to him at knee height and the other guy’s eyes run over his back and linger on his ass.

“That’s Sam’s angel author. His name’s Castiel. He’s hot, huh?” 

Dean didn’t even notice Liam come up to him. He’s obviously been watching Dean watching the two figures on the balcony. 

Liam turns to look up at them. “He’s some well-respected religious academic who’s had a whole bunch of books published. Rich, smart, successful. And those blue eyes? Man!” Liam whistles appreciatively. “I tried to let him know that I was available but I guess I’m not his type. I think Sam’s known him for a while. Looks like they might have some history together.” 

“Quit snake-whispering at me, Liam.” He isn’t blind and doesn’t need Liam to state the obvious. Dean ignores his Who, me? expression. “Let him know that I dropped by. I don’t want to disturb him if he’s working.” 

“Sure,” Liam smirks. “By the way, Sam asked me to book a table for the three of you at L'Arpège for eight tonight. Have a good time.” His voice suggests that he doesn’t think it’s even remotely possible that Dean’s going to have a good time and that the thought gives him some perverse pleasure.

Regardless of this kid’s emotional damage, the day’s going to come when Dean is going to show him that everybody is personally responsible for what they say and do.

He’d forgotten that Sam had invited him to dinner to meet this Castiel guy tonight. From the offhand way Sam had spoken about him, Dean had assumed that he was a professional acquaintance, someone Sam had met through a publisher who had become a friend. Clearly not the whole story. 

This is all he needs after the day that he’s having. He can see the headline: Jealous cop drowns his lover’s ex-boyfriend in a bowl of soup at NYC’s finest French eatery. 

 

***  
Because fate is a fickle, vindictive bitch, his day gets a whole lot worse when he returns to the precinct. 

“What?” he asks when he walks in and Henriksen gives him a pained, wary look.

“You’re not going to like it.”

“Spit it out, Vic.”

“Sophie, your informant on that series of murder and robbery cases, has just been found in her apartment. Her kid, too. They’re dead, Dean.”

Anger slams through him so hard he actually experiences a moment of vertigo and has to sit down quickly. He tries to breathe through the urge for violence that burns through his body.

“What happened?”

“You know what happened. The psychotic boyfriend got out of prison yesterday and managed to find out where she was living. Sophie was so screwed-up she probably called him herself. Dean!” 

He’s not listening, out of his chair like a gunshot and almost through the door when Henriksen grabs his arm and pulls him around, hands gripping his biceps. “He’s dead. Shot himself afterwards.” Henriksen’s hands are warm and steadying. “Settle down. I know how hard you worked to get her to testify, to get her set up in a new place. That’s what we do. There’s always the risk of a come-back. You know that.” 

“I promised her, Vic. I promised her that she could start over, that she’d be safe. Jesus, the kid, too?” 

He can’t even bear the thought of that introverted little boy who lit up like Christmas lights whenever he got any attention not being allowed to grow up into the person he could have become, if all the adults in his life hadn’t been so set on fucking up everything for him from the start. 

Henriksen nods. “You couldn’t have known.” Dean shakes free of his grip. “Don’t go over there, Dean. It’s bad. It’s really, really bad.”

He goes to the apartment anyway because that’s the kind of person he is. 

It’s amazing the amount of blood that’s contained in the human body, the damage that a blade can do to the ephemeral divide between skin and internal things. 

Sophie died in the kitchen that became a slaughterhouse, her struggle written in blood on the floor and walls, and reminding him of a folktale that somebody once read to him as a kid. 

The one about the tortoise who is about to be eaten by a leopard and begs for a five minute reprieve. He spends his final moments desperately scratching at the earth, round and round in circles like he’s trying to burrow an escape route. The leopard licks his claws and asks the tortoise what the fuck he’s doing. The tortoise replies that if anyone ever stumbled upon this place, this place where he died, they’d know that somebody had struggled here, had fought, left their mark and not gone easy. 

The psycho-boyfriend that Sophie couldn’t ever escape died messily in her living-room. 

Dean doesn’t make it to the kid’s bedroom. He can’t. 

Henriksen is waiting for him outside. “I need a drink,” Dean says to him. Henriksen nods and takes him to O’Malley’s.

So, his empty gut is burning with whiskey, his head full of dead children when he arrives at L'Arpège at eight, its name flaring like a fluorescent flag over the darkened street.

 

***  
Dean hates this kind of place, hates the smug, moneyed bubble that separates these people from the real world that exists for everyone else. He can’t imagine that Sam would have chosen this restaurant, knowing how antsy he gets around ostentation. L'Arpège is Liam’s doing. He seems to get off on giving Dean a hard time. It’s mostly just who Liam is and partly, Dean thinks, because Liam’s jealous of his relationship with Sam. The kid has issues.

The restaurant adds fire to the latent anger that’s been building up in him all day. He’s in the mood for a fight. 

Henriksen had tried to talk him into calling Sam from O’Malley’s and canceling. “You’re drunk, depressed and pissed off and you’re going to screw things up with Sam, who is the best thing that ever happened to you. Stay here and we’ll finish off the rest of the bottle. Don’t do this, Dean,” he’d said. 

That small, rational voice at the back of Dean’s mind had agreed with Henriksen. The way it always does. But the memory of Sam’s hand lingering on Castiel’s arm and the two of them laughing together silenced it.

The maître d’ looks at him with haughtily raised eyebrows when Dean gives him Sam’s name and huffs an affected little sigh as he runs his eyes down the reservation list. Dean guesses that his rumpled suit and the smell of crime and the streets clinging to him isn’t something that the guy’s accustomed to. He snorts under his breath. That gets him another haughty look.

Sam and Castiel are already seated at a table on the other end of the room. Dean is led through the tables of glamorous people talking about fashion week, stocks and shares, the newest Mercedes and the state of the economy. 

Sam looks up and smiles at him. Something about his appearance must transmit his state of mind because Sam’s smile falters, slips first into a look of concern, then into one of wariness. 

“Hi,” he says quietly when Dean reaches the table and stands up to place his hand gently on Dean’s shoulder. Dean remains impassive under his touch and looks at Castiel who has also stood up. 

“Dean, this is Castiel.” 

They shake hands over the table, Dean’s grip harder than he means for it to be. Sometimes Neanderthal Man is just his default setting. Castiel winces and then something that could be amusement flits over his good-looking, impassive face when Dean releases his hand.

“Sorry about this place,” Sam says as they sit down. “Liam insisted on it and then Cas offered to pay, so it’s champagne and lobster all round.” 

Dean doesn’t return Sam’s grin. Cas? Seriously?

Sam frowns and starts fiddling with his wineglass. Castiel replies, “It’s the least I can do, Sam, when you’re hosting another one of my tedious book launches.”

A waiter comes over. Dean ignores the wine list and orders a double bourbon. “So,” he says to Castiel, “you’re a writer?” Making it sound more like an accusation than a question.

“Yes.” 

Dean was expecting a long and self-indulgent response but that’s all he gets.

“Cas has just written a book about the belief in angelic beings in different religions,” Sam fills in.

“Angels, huh?” Dean injects as much derision as he can into the word. 

“Dean,” Sam says in quiet warning.

Castiel’s lips twitch and he inclines his head in acknowledgement of the laughable potential inherent in the subject. His expression turns serious as he says, “The belief in benevolent supernatural beings who act as emissaries for the Godhead, whatever form that might take, who bring enlightenment and act as guardians to humanity is ancient and spans many cultures. It’s built into many faith systems.” 

Dean isn’t churlish enough—or maybe drunk enough—to pretend a stifled yawn. “Sounds fascinating,” he says dryly. 

Castiel’s lips quirk slightly again. The guy doesn’t seem to do full expressions. He has a cool, removed manner about him that makes it hard for Dean to work out if he’s actually laughing at him.

“Should we order?” Sam asks quickly.

“Sure,” Dean answers, swallowing half his bourbon and opening a menu. “Is there a French version of angel food cake?” The menu is ten pages long, mostly in French and without prices. He snorts and says, “Steak and frites for me,” throwing the menu down onto the table and almost knocking over Sam’s wineglass. 

Sam seems to tire of the polite, pretend-like-nothing’s-wrong-with-Dean routine. “What’s wrong? Have you been drinking?” 

The slightly hurt undertone is what elicits Dean’s honest answer. “I’ve had a really shitty day.” Sam reaches under the table and squeezes his knee. It makes Dean more magnanimous towards Castiel. “Work. You know how it is.” 

Castiel nods, as if he could possibly understand what Dean means by that. “I imagine you must see all kinds of horrors in the course of your job. I’m sorry if this dinner is poorly timed.”

Dean wants to ruffle that smooth, unemotional exterior. “Can you? Imagine the horrors that I’ve seen today? Where are the guardian angels when a child is suffocated to death and thrown out with the trash? Do they stand by and watch as a woman gets butchered in her own kitchen?”

Sam half-rises out of his chair. “This isn’t a good idea. Let’s go home, Dean. We can do this another time.” 

His movement is cut short by Dean’s hand on one arm and Castiel’s on the other.

“We’re just talking here, Sam.”

“It’s fine, Sam. Let Dean say what he has to say.”

Sam sinks back into his chair. He reaches across the table and half-empties the wine bottle into his glass, which is the size of a small fishbowl. Loosening the top couple of buttons of his shirt, he takes a big swallow of his wine and settles back in his chair, shrugging his shoulders in resignation. 

Dean wants to lean over and suck a purple mark of possession at the base of his throat where his collar gapes open.

“I find your skepticism perplexing, Dean. You of all people should believe that people can be saved through supernatural agency.”

“He knows about that?” Dean asks Sam, feeling betrayed. It’s irritating to think that Sam has discussed him with Castiel when Dean didn’t even know that the guy existed before yesterday. Admittedly, it’s not like he’s ever shown any interest in Sam’s previous relationships, but that’s because he doesn’t want to think about Sam with anyone else.

It bothers him even more that Castiel seems completely at ease talking about Sam’s visions. It’s not that Dean doesn’t genuinely believe that Sam is able to foretell when someone close to him is going to die violently. Dean’s living proof of its truth. It’s just that verbalizing it makes the psychic thing real in a way that he doesn’t want it to be, like if he ignores it, it will just go away. 

Sam seems to have adopted Castiel’s abbreviated responses. “Yes, Dean, he knows.” He looks back at Dean steadily, rolling his wineglass between his fingers.

The conversation is interrupted by a waiter. 

“Will you allow me to order for you?” Castiel asks him politely. “I’m familiar with the menu.”

Of course he is. 

“As long as it isn’t vegetarian and is something that I can recognize then I’m happy for you to order for me. I don’t do horse or things that crawl around in their own slime on my plate. Cloven-hoofed animals only.”

Castiel looks amused. “I know just the thing.” 

Sam allows Castiel to order for him too. The way that he doesn’t even have to tell Castiel his preferences raises little hairy hackles at the back of Dean’s neck.

“Sam told me about his vision. The one that saved you. It seems that something stepped in to prevent your death.”

Dean’s eyes meet Sam’s. “Yeah, I guess it did. But mostly it was Sam storming into the precinct, raising hell in the way that only he can, and my partner kicking down the door to beat the crap out of the guy who was trying to carve me up like rump-roast with a razorblade. I’ll take a human being over a supernatural one any day.”

Sam half-smiles at him but doesn’t say anything. 

Dean’s not used to Sam being this quiet, wonders what it means. It pisses him off to think that Castiel does this to him. “The angels can go fuck themselves,” he says to Castiel. “I want to know where they were when this woman was being hacked to death in her own home.” His head is flooded with images of that bloodied kitchen. “This guy gets out of prison, right.” It sounds like the opening line to a joke. “This asshole who was supposed to be taking care of the woman and her kid. He kills them both in a frenzy…you wouldn’t even believe it if I told you. It’s like he was—”

“Possessed?” Castiel supplies.

Dean guesses Castiel doesn’t talk in metaphors and that he means it literally. 

“Possessed? By what?” he scoffs.

“An evil spirit, a demon, dybbuk, daeva, there are many names for them.”

“And maybe he was just a sick son of a bitch who did what he did with his eyes wide open.” 

“Yes, perhaps it was that, but perhaps it was something else.” 

“You actually believe that?”

“I believe that I recently saw a man frothing at the mouth, his body and spirit seized by something that was not of this world. He was cursing the people around him and blood started to pour from their noses, until a holy man freed the possessed man’s spirit and cast that darkness from him. Yes, I believe that.”

Dean snorts and orders another bourbon. “What about you, Sam? You believe in angels and demons?”

Sam’s throat is flushed against the crisp whiteness of his unbuttoned shirt. Dean notices that his glass is mostly empty. Sam doesn’t get drunk. He’s normally too controlled. Dean has to ignore the urge to hustle him out of the restaurant so that he can throw him down onto a bed and watch that flush cover his body.

Sam’s eyelids are alcohol-heavy, his voice low and amused when he replies. “You’re asking the guy who has death visions whether he believes in the supernatural? It goes with the territory, Dean. And I was raised to be open-minded. You’ve met Ginnie, right? My eccentric godmother who spent two years in a peyote haze in the desert communing with her inner-animal spirit.” He snorts and takes another swallow of his wine. “Skepticism is not the norm. The majority of people all around the world try to make sense of their lives through the belief in something beyond all of this. And yes, the belief in a greater good naturally leads to questions about evil.”

Castiel seems to be as fascinated by the vee of blood-warmed skin beneath Sam’s throat as Dean is. His gaze switches back to Dean and he doesn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed. “The Vatican still trains exorcists. Even in this skeptical age, the Catholic Church still prepares men specifically for the purpose of banishing evil. All the things that you’ve seen, Dean, you’ve never questioned where it comes from?” 

The bourbon is buzzing through his veins, half-assed ideas sounding like cold, clear facts in his head. “Religion is just the denial of the truth that we’re an accident clinging to a rock in the emptiness of cold space. There’s nothing out there. We’re animals. We eat, get drunk, breed, and kill each other. That’s all there is to it.” 

“You don’t believe that,” Sam says to him.

“Don’t tell me what I believe.”

Sam shrugs and breathes out a tired sigh. A waiter is rearranging the cutlery in preparation for their meals being brought out. He’s young, dark-haired and doe-eyed, with soft pouting lips. “How about you, Handsome?” Dean drawls. “Do you believe in demon possession?”

The boy loses that distant, robotic look that waiters and all menials wear to pretend like they’re not listening to what’s being said around them. He meets Dean’s eyes and gives him a flirtatious smile. “You’re the most interesting table here tonight,” he says. “You wouldn’t believe the boring conversations I normally hear.” 

Dean snorts, “Oh, we believe you.”

“My mother, who is a good Catholic woman, told me that once she was praying in her bedroom and she became aware of a presence in the corner of the room, something dark and evil that tried to pull her away from her prayers. My mother is a pragmatic woman and lacking in imagination. I believed her. This is why I prefer not to pray. Only the holy are a target for evil spirits. The devil isn’t concerned with those of us who enjoy our sin.” He gives Dean a suggestive look like he’s offering to share some of those sinful pleasures with him.

Dean is still grinning when the waiter walks away. Sam gives him a thunderous look. “Flirting with the waiter, Dean? Wow, that’s classy.”

“It’s harmless and less irritating than flirting with an ex-lover. I dropped by the bookstore today but you were busy.” He looks at Castiel as he says it.

“Is that what all this is about?”

Dean’s response is cut off by Castiel. “You have nothing to fear from me, Dean. Whatever Sam and I had, it was over a long time ago. I could never give Sam what he needed.” He says it like he’s repeating words that aren’t his own.

Sam looks embarrassed and Dean’s jealousy drains away, followed by the realization that he’s behaving like an asshole. He has these moments sometimes, cool, removed moments of clarity where he can see himself reacting to his own bullshit rather than to the situation that he’s being faced with. “Sorry,” he says, meaning it. “I’m kind of possessive by nature. Always have been.” He tries to explain himself, aiming for something to lighten the mood. “One time when I was a kid I punched my best friend in the nose just for playing with my action-figures without my permission.” 

It’s true. He’s always been jealous, always tried to hold on too hard to things and to people that he feels belong to him. It’s probably because he’s always been afraid that something was going to come along and take away what little he has. 

“I’m not an action-figure, Dean.”

He can’t help it — it’s just too easy. “No, Sam, you’re more like a sophisticated, gay Ken doll.” 

Castiel makes a sound that could possibly be classified as a guffaw. 

Sam scowls at both of them. “You’re a real prick sometimes, Dean.”

“I know,” Dean admits. 

Their food arrives and Castiel diverts the conversation to more neutral subjects. He talks about the two years he spent travelling and researching his book. He tells a good story and actually has a dry sense of humor. Dean can see why Sam might’ve once been attracted to him. He has a sharp, observational intelligence and a quiet stillness about him that makes him easy to be around. There’s clearly still something between him and Sam, but most of it seems to come from Castiel. He wears an occasionally regretful expression when he looks at Sam. Dean doesn’t think it’s something that weighs too heavy on him, though. He’s clearly obsessed with his work and comes across as one of those people who are intellectual to the detriment of their emotions.

After the meal, Dean has a moment alone in the lobby with Castiel when Sam collects their coats. “It was good to finally meet you, Dean,” he says, holding out a hand. Dean shakes it and doesn’t try to crush his fingers this time. “You seem to be a good man, maybe a man who feels too much and allows his feelings to get in the way of his better judgement, but I think Sam will help you with that. You’re better suited to him than I ever was.” 

He’s trying really hard to dislike Castiel but it’s starting to feel like an exercise in futility.

They leave the restaurant and Dean shares a cab with Sam even though he’s unsure whether they’re actually going home together. Sam is silent and stares out the window at the dark, wind-swept streets.

“Maybe I should go back to my place,” Dean suggests. He’s been spending pretty much all of his time at Sam’s. He avoids his own apartment because it has a cold, dusty, abandoned feel to it that he finds depressing.

Sam turns to face him. “Do you want to go back to your place?”

“No.”

Sam shrugs like the decision has been made and goes back to staring out the window.

“You pissed at me?” Dean asks.

“No,” Sam answers and then qualifies it with, “not really.” 

Sam isn’t exactly ignoring him but he’s cool and distant when they get back to the apartment. 

They go through their evening rituals and fall asleep on opposite sides of the bed, a big, empty space between them.

The digital alarm clock shows him that it’s 1:00 a.m. when Dean wakes up. He reaches out a hand to find the bed cold next to him.

Sam is doing Qigong in front of the tall windows that line one wall of the living-room, dark shadows and the full winter moon turning him into a silent black and white movie against the window frame. 

Dean stretches out on the couch to watch him. Sam’s beautiful when he does Qigong. The slow, graceful way that he changes position makes it look like he’s moving underwater. He’s obviously aware that Dean’s watching him but doesn’t stop until he’s finished with the routine. 

He comes over and Dean pulls his legs up so that Sam can sit down on the couch with him. 

They’re facing each other in the gloom, one of Sam’s legs hooked over Dean’s. “You okay?” Dean asks him quietly.

“Yeah, better now,” Sam answers. “Bad dreams.”

Dean rubs his foot comfortingly along Sam’s calf. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“I was dreaming about the day my dad died.”

Dean knows that it’s a recurring nightmare. It makes him feel uncomfortable when Sam talks about it, brings up too many of his own bad memories, things that he’d rather lock away and not have to revisit. He can’t imagine what it must have been like for a thirteen year old Sam to be gripped in the throes of a vision in the middle of a Math lesson watching his father die in a pile-up hundreds of miles away on his way home from a business trip. 

“You never want to talk about it.”

“I’m listening, Sam. Hey, I get what it’s like to grow up without a mom and then have to lose a dad too, remember.”

“I don’t mean that. You never want to talk about my visions. Although you don’t talk about your parents’ deaths either.”

“I’ve told you about how they both died. You know my mom was killed when she surprised a burglar in our house and that they never caught the guy. I was four years old and if it wasn’t for photographs I’d probably have forgotten what she looks like. You know my dad was shot when he was working a case. I’ve told you all this. Why do you want to keep opening up old wounds?”

“That’s not talking, Dean. It’s a police report.” 

“Jesus, Sam, would you just let it go. I’m not like you. I don’t need to talk. I need to forget about it and get on with my life. And I don’t avoid talking about your visions. I just don’t understand them.”

“It’s going to happen again. You know that, right.”

“Yeah, I know. But how many people in your life can possibly die a violent, unnatural death? Anyway, you have a full time job being my own personal guardian angel.” 

Sam’s half hidden in darkness. He looks like something secret, black bars of shadow falling over him and the white moonlight filling in the spaces between. “Come over here,” Dean whispers to him. 

Sam hesitates, looks like he’s going to refuse and murmurs something like It’s not the answer to everything as he sits up. He looms above Dean for a moment like some formidable Old Testament messenger, his face dark and obscured, the light sweeping up behind him as he settles his knees on either side of Dean’s body. 

Dean doesn’t know what the question is but he’s pretty sure that Sam pressed up against him, his hand a tight-fingered grip at the base of Dean’s neck and holding his head in place for a deep, overwhelming kiss is the answer to any question. 

“Sorry if I behaved like a dick tonight,” Dean says when Sam lets him breathe again.

“It’s in your nature. You always try to sabotage yourself.”

Dean’s lips twist in wry acknowledgement at the truth of that statement. “You haven’t seen anything yet. Stick around and you’ll get a front row seat to the inevitable Greek tragedy that is the Dean Winchester story.”

“I plan to,” Sam says, rubbing his thumb along Dean’s bottom lip. “Stick around,” he clarifies as he strokes his fingers across Dean’s cheek.

Dean turns his head to suck Sam’s thumb into his mouth, closes his eyes and runs his tongue across the palm of Sam’s hand, lower, to bite at the pulse beating in his wrist. He pushes Sam’s hand down his chest, saliva-wet fingers leaving cold trails of goose-bumps against his skin, to where their hips meet. 

Sam leans forward, his face a split mask of shadow and light. “What you do, Dean, your job. It’s important. You help people. But it’s not everything. There are good things in the world. Things that last. There’s happiness to be had, if you just allow it.”

Dean considers the response that first crosses his mind—that he’d be really happy if Sam just widened his legs, lifted his hips and eased down onto him—but he doesn’t voice it, goes for the worse option, his tone flippant and dismissive, and the words out of his mouth before he has a chance to rethink them. “Kittens and rainbows and you, Sam. These are a few of my favorite things.” 

His heart feels like it incinerates in his chest at the hurt look on Sam’s face. 

Sam starts to move away, pained and resigned. Dean grabs his arms. “What do you want me to say, Sam? The truth is that the world fucking slows down when I’m around you. Sometimes I feel like all I can see and hear is you. I’m scared of it.”

“It’s a start,” Sam says quietly, settling back down onto his body. 

Somehow Sam always manages to simultaneously be the safest and most frightening thing in his life. 

 

***  
Dean has this nagging urge to see Gabe the next day.

Jo can be difficult as hell but when it comes to Gabe she has this irritated tolerance that allows him to turn up at her doorstep at six in the morning.

“What are you doing here, Dean?” she asks sharply in her bathrobe at the door. “Do you know what time it is?”

“I need to see him,” he says. “I brought apple danishes.” He holds up the bag as evidence.

She sees the desperation on his face and opens the door to allow him in. “I’ll make some coffee.”

“Thanks,” he says quietly as he walks in, feeling like a stranger in the house that he once lived in. 

Jo gives him a long look and takes the bag from his hand, nodding her head in the direction of the stairs. “He’s probably still asleep.” 

Gabe is sprawled on his back, arms outstretched and mouth open. Dean pauses in the bedroom doorway to take in his son’s vulnerability. He’s so frightened by it and the fierce, protective urge that floods through him that it takes his breath away for a minute. 

He walks over to the bed to burrow his face into the softness of Gabe’s neck. Gabe wakes up surprised and grumpy, batting at Dean’s head as he tries to stretch away from his stubble-roughened embrace. “Hey. It’s me,” Dean reassures him. 

Gabe frowns and looks undecided before yawning and starting a burbling monologue that lasts through them choosing his clothes for the day. Gabe’s meant to be talking properly already. It’s been suggested by some (mostly Henriksen) that Dean’s lack of eloquence is the reason for his slow verbal development. Gabe’s hovering at the edge of it, like one day all the sounds he makes will suddenly, magically turn into words that make sense. 

Dean watches Gabe brushing his teeth and marvels at the person who invented sparkling stars in kid’s toothpaste and at Gabe’s ability to earnestly talk through the process of teeth-brushing.

Jo’s man clearly isn’t happy to see Dean at the breakfast table and hides himself behind the newspaper. Gabe stops making talk noises so that he can suck milky cereal from a spoon, looking up to grin toothily at Dean occasionally. Dean grins back at him and drinks his coffee, completely enchanted by the beauty of his kid.

“Maybe you and Sam could have him for a weekend,” Jo says to him. 

Dean suddenly imagines all kinds of domestic accidents where Gabe drowns in the bath and is electrocuted by un-child-friendly electrical sockets. 

Jo rolls her eyes at his terrified expression. “He’ll be fine, Dean. You’ll come out of the experience worse off than Gabe will, I promise.”

Dean grins at her shame-facedly. “Can you imagine me and Sam taking him to the park.” As he verbalizes it, the image becomes less unattainable in his head. 

“I’m sure all the open-minded mothers at the park down the street from Sam’s place will love your modern, non-nuclear family, darling,” she answers in a camp, overly-affected voice. 

Dean snorts. When did they get to a place where they can talk like this? He’s not sure when it happened but he’s grateful for it. He kisses her on the cheek with genuine affection as he makes to leave and whispers a thank you through the blonde, flower-scented hair that drapes over her ear. 

Jo’s man folds over an edge of his newspaper and gives Dean a sharp look. 

“Just a heads-up, dude. You really want to watch all those unpaid parking tickets you’re accumulating,” Dean says to him before getting up and starting to head towards the door. He smirks at the annoyed sound Jo makes behind him. 

“I’m not your business anymore, Dean. Quit checking up on everybody in my life,” she calls out.

Dean doesn’t turn around. Yeah, right, like that’s ever going to happen.

 

***  
He doesn’t go directly to the precinct. There’s something else nagging at him that he can’t ignore.

The answer’s at the school. It has to be. There’s no way an outsider managed to lure Daisy away from its safe confines. Somebody missed something, some small thing that will unravel the secret of that little girl’s murder.

The playground is empty as Dean wanders through it, cold metal equipment looking like painted mechanical beasts in the frozen stillness. It’s going to snow. The sky is a pink haze of promise. 

He skirts his way along the perimeter of the railings to the side of the building and follows the long outer wall to the back of the school. The turn-of-the-century architecture is more authentic here, more worn, less friendly than the modernised façade. It’s reminiscent of a time when instilling fear was the primary lesson for stern-faced educators. 

There’s a gate onto a small side road running behind the school. A station-wagon is parked on the paved driveway next to a pair of green dumpsters. Dean rubs at the frosted glass of the station-wagon’s back window. A stained canvas tarp is laid down in the back, a chainsaw and heavy-duty refuse bags filled with dead branches on top of it. Probably the caretaker’s vehicle. 

A metal door with orange rust flowering along its edges stands slightly ajar at the back of the building. Dean pushes it open, peers into the dank darkness and sees a light shining from a room about twenty yards down the passageway. Curious, he checks it out.

The room contains a desk, a single filing cabinet and an area for making coffee. Metal shelves against one wall display various handyman tools.

“You shouldn’t be down here. This area is off limits.”

Dean turns to see a man standing in the doorway behind him. He’s slightly built, dark-haired and sallow-skinned, and is wearing an unfriendly scowl.

“I’m Detective Winchester,” Dean says showing his badge. “Are you the caretaker?”

“Yeah. You investigating that kid’s death?” Dean nods. The guy goes over to the table in the corner and turns the kettle on. “I already answered the other cop’s questions. What are you doing down here?”

“Looking around,” Dean answers, putting his badge away and leisurely scanning the room again.

“Nothing to see down here, Detective. The kiddies aren’t allowed in my office.”

“Some office.”

The guy makes himself a cup of coffee, doesn’t offer Dean one, and sits down on a chair behind the desk, looking up at Dean. “It suits me okay. Nice and quiet down here.”

“How long have you been working at the school?”

“Like I said, I already answered that question when the other cop asked it.”

The man’s unfriendly reticence is starting to work on Dean’s nerves. “Humor me,” he says coldly. 

“A couple of weeks. I’m new to the city,” the caretaker eventually answers.

“Where were you before?”

“Here and there.”

Dean gives him a hard look. “Can you be a little more specific?”

“Lived most of my life down in Virginia until I got it into my head that I needed a change.” He drains his coffee and stands up. “Listen, Detective, much as I’d love to stay and chat, I’ve already been through all of this. I have nothing to add to my statement and my break is over. I’ve got work to do.” 

There’s a really weird vibe emanating from this guy. And it’s not just about his rudeness. A lot of people get their barriers up when they’re being questioned by the cops, even if they’re completely innocent of anything illegal. With some, it comes from that suspicion of government authority and an overextended sense of their own civil liberties. With others, Dean has this theory that it’s about inherent guilt. Authority figures like parents, teachers, cops and priests bring it out in them, even as adults. It’s something that he recognizes straight away and has learned to work around.

Then, of course, there’s that defensiveness that comes from real guilt. Simply, it’s because they’re responsible for the murder he’s investigating or purposefully hiding something that will lead him to solving the case. 

Recognizing those differences is two parts experience—born out of years of watching facial expressions and studying human nature—and one part intuition, something his father always taught him to trust. When he was a kid, his dad had told him that there were two types of cops: those that were trained to do the job and real cops who had natural instincts that couldn’t be taught.

One time, a few years back, over a bottle of whiskey at O’Malley’s, Dean had been outlining this profound philosophy to Henriksen. His partner had mockingly called it the Winchester spidey-sense. But Dean knew that Henriksen had understood exactly what he was saying. 

He knew because Henriksen has it too, that tingling, physical sense of just knowing sometimes. 

And this caretaker, he’s guilty as hell of something. It’s rolling off him in waves. 

Dean can tell, though, that he isn’t going to get anything out of him right now. There’s an art to interrogation, and Dean’s good at it, really good, but sometimes it pays to be forearmed. In other words, he has some research and desk work ahead of him. His service pistol and handcuffs are the preferred tools of his trade but in reality his phone and computer get more mileage (and fewer public complaints). 

“Sure, don’t let me keep you. Thanks for your cooperation. If you think of anything that might be useful to the investigation, give me a call.” Dean hands over his card. 

The caretaker flicks it on the desk without a glance.

Dean’s going to enjoy hauling this asshole into the precinct, but first he’s got some digging to do.

 

***  
Back at his desk Dean pulls all the information he can get on the caretaker. 

Cyrus Matthews has been employed at the school for a little less than two weeks. He took early retirement after working for twenty years in the Virginia prison service, the final ten years as a guard on death row at the state pen outside Waverly. 

Same place Henriksen had heard Harvelle on the phone with. 

“What did you say was the name of that guy who got executed down at Waverly? The one you overheard Harvelle talking about?” He asks Henriksen out of interest.

“You starting on me again, Winchester? I thought we’d established that the pot doesn’t get to call the kettle black.”

“The politically correct term is African American. And no, Partner, I was just asking you a question. Don’t be so overly sensitive. Interfering nosiness is a good personal quality in a detective.”

“If I was so sensitive, Winchester, I’d have a problem with your racial comment and criticism of my character. I never told you this, mostly because I was trying to spare your feelings, but the reason I was assigned as your partner is exactly because I’m not overly sensitive. And because I have an infinite amount of patience with assholes. Everybody told me it was the only real requirement for working with you. How many partners did you get through before I entered your life like a ray of sunshine? Three in the space of a year, was it?”

“You’re the light of my life, Vic, the only man who really gets me.” He’s being facetious, but actually there’s some truth in that. “And you know I didn’t mean anything by the racial comment, brother. I’m a sensitive kinda guy. Didn’t I sit through that ‘African roots in American Blues’ festival you dragged me to last weekend without a single complaint?” As a grumbling aside, he mutters, “Who goes to a music festival and spends their Saturday sitting through a whole bunch of lectures?” 

“Infinite patience, Dean. How can you lie with such a straight face? You didn’t stop complaining from the minute we arrived. Even Sam, who is ridiculously tolerant of your many vices, called you a juvenile delinquent. Not that I expected anything less from somebody with the attention span of an 8th grader who thinks that music starts and ends with Led Zeppelin.”

“I’m not doing the Jimmy Page versus B.B. King greatest guitarist debate with you again. Last time it almost ended in blood and tears. Yours, of course.”

“You’re just jealous of my extensive knowledge of music and impeccable rhythm,” Henriksen replies, standing up and twirling his office chair around like a dance partner. “I’m going out. Burgers or sandwiches?” he asks, shimmying towards the door and ‘accidentally’ knocking a stack of paperwork off Dean’s desk. 

Dean manages to catch some of the files before they hit the floor. “Your head on a plate, Twinkle Toes. What the fuck’s the guy’s name?”

Henriksen finally answers his question and gives Dean the middle finger as he grabs a pretty uniformed officer walking past to waltz her giggling out of the office. 

 

***  
Dean’s so lost in what he’s reading that he barely notices the greasy burger Henriksen slaps on his desk an hour later.

“It’s a pleasure.”

Dean ignores the sarcasm, preoccupied with the strangeness of what he’s looking at. His shoulders feel all twitchy. “Tell me this isn’t fucking weird.”

“What?” Henriksen mumbles through a mouthful of burger.

“June of ’94 Harvelle is involved in an investigation into the murders of six kids. The suspect is a guy called Llewellyn Jackson—”

“I told you his name’s Jonathan Roberts. He—”

“No, listen, Vic. This guy is called Llewellyn Jackson. They found six bodies in his basement here in New York. He disappears and six months later dead kids start turning up in Virginia. They arrest a different guy, Jonathan Roberts, when they catch him with a body in the woods. Harvelle is down there for the trial. It’s in the report. The cases are cross-referenced because of their similarities. Check out the crime scene photographs.”

“Jesus!” Henriksen exclaims, choking on his burger as he stares open-mouthed at the photographs.

“Daisy, right?”

Henriksen wipes away some ketchup at the corner of his mouth, looks at Dean, then back at the photographs. There’s a pause before he says. “It’s like looking at the same scene, the way they’re staged with the bags over their heads and sitting up against a wall or tree with their hands folded on their laps. This is why Harvelle was so freaked, right?”

“Wouldn’t you be if you’d seen these bodies before Daisy’s?”

“Jesus, it’s uncanny.”

Dean lowers his voice. “That’s not all. Do you want to hear the weirdest thing about this?” He leaves it hanging, loaded and suspenseful.

Henriksen has moved right up next to him, his face a couple of inches away as he looks at Dean’s computer screen. He turns his head and widens his eyes in a horror-movie parody of fear, whispers, “I’m all ears, narrator.” 

Dean jerks away. “You’re such an ass. I swear—” 

“Dean, just stop with the suspense and tell me already! You know it drives me nuts when you insist on drawing shit out.”

Henriksen’s problem is that he lacks patience and imagination. He’s all about the immediate problem-solving, has always been this way. Dean knows that one day him and Tara, Henriksen’s daughter, will sit down to complain about how much her father sucks at suspense and story-telling. 

“There’s a new caretaker at Daisy’s school and it turns out that he knew Jonathan Roberts. He was a guard on death row at Waverley. Suddenly took sick leave the day after Roberts’ execution and then early retirement.” 

“What? Wait…” Henriksen’s frowning. Dean can see him trying to make sense of it. “What?” he repeats.

“I went to the school this morning, just to have a look around, when I meet this guy. I’m telling you, Vic, he gave me the creeps. He lurks in this cave of an office in the basement of the school like…I don’t know, like something that lurks around in a cave.”

“A bear?” Henriksen offers, the sarcastic sting of his comeback reduced by the smear of ketchup that rebelliously sticks to his cheek and his wounded, angry expression as he stares at the crime scene photographs.

“No, Henriksen, not like a bear, you dickhead.” Dean licks his thumb and wipes away the red smear on his partner’s cheek, then nudges him with a sharp elbow, trying to jerk him out of transposing Tara’s face onto the faces in the crime scene photographs—he’s done it with Gabe and knows that Henriksen is doing the same thing—and into concentrating on the case. “I looked him up and there it is: he knew Roberts.”

“It’s a coincidence.”

“When was the last time you came across something on a case that turned out to just be a coincidence?”

“Never,” Henriksen admits. “Is there a connection between Jackson and Roberts?”

“Not that I can work out. There isn’t anything that links them directly, but it turns out that Jackson grew up a few towns over from where Roberts was living.”

“So it’s possible that they knew each other? What the hell is this? Some cult or weird virus that gets passed on through physical contact and causes men to start murdering children in the same way?”

Dean shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

“You need to talk to Harvelle.” 

“I know.”

“Good luck with that. She’s in a scary mood. When I saw her earlier, she was ripping Kowalski a new one for all the overtime he’s claiming this month.”

“Overtime?” Dean sneers. “The guy’s usually asleep when he’s doing his normal hours, what the fuck is he putting in for overtime?” 

Henriksen shrugs and picks up his cold, half-eaten burger. “The world is a screwed up place, Dean. The older I get, the less anything makes sense to me.” 

 

***  
“I just came across the weirdest thing, Captain,” Dean says at the open doorway to Harvelle’s office. She’s looking out the window at the impressive view her top-storey office affords over the city. In profile, she’s a study of introspection. 

“Something on the Daisy MacDonald case?” she asks him, her face still averted. She looks tired, older.

He’s suddenly struck by the fact that he doesn’t really know Ellen Harvelle. 

It’s mostly because they’ve always been positioned into playing these defined roles with each other. When Dean had first started seeing Jo, she hadn’t wanted her mother to know about their relationship and Dean had been happy to go along with that. Sneaking around added an edge to it. It was complicated by him knowing that Harvelle was occasionally fucking his father—the rumor mill constantly grinding in the precinct—and her quick rise through the ranks to his commanding officer. It’s incestuous is what it is. And it’s less about the blood-ties as it is about the precinct. There’s a reason for the directive against cops who are personally involved working together. He doesn’t really know her because she’s always made him feel like a kid, like he’s got to constantly prove himself to her. 

“You going to stand there staring at me all day, Winchester, or are you going to tell me something?”

Her tone makes him bypass the preamble he’d worked out in his head. “Stop me if any of this sounds familiar. Llewellyn Jackson suffocated kids in his basement. Jonathan Roberts suffocated kids in the woods. The new caretaker at Daisy’s school was a prison guard who did the dead man walking with Jonathan Roberts.” 

She jerks her head sharply in his direction, turning ashen-faced when he mentions the caretaker. 

“The crime scenes look like one plus one plus one equals three. But I guess you already knew that.”

“Shut the door.” 

When he closes the door and sits down opposite her, she throws a file of newspaper clippings on the desk in front of him.

“What am I looking at?”

“More of the equation, Dean. Two guards who were responsible for Roberts at Waverley murdered their own children during his incarceration. The first one in ’98. His wife came home after her night shift to find their four year old drowned in the bath. He was sitting propped up between the taps, had been left in the water for hours. The second guard suffocated his eight year old daughter with a pillow three years later. They found her sitting up against the headboard, staged like the others with her hands folded in her lap. Two completely ordinary men with no history of mental illness suddenly lose it and destroy their lives, and neither of them had any memory of doing it. The first guy is in a psychiatric hospital. The second shot himself with his service revolver the day after he killed his little girl.” 

Henriksen’s virus theory starts to sound more plausible. Dean finds himself weakly repeating his partner’s earlier statement. “It could be a coincidence, right? Anybody who goes into the prison service probably has issues in the first place.” 

Harvelle looks at him with hollow eyes. “There’s something else going on here, Dean. You know it. I’ve known it for years. I just didn’t want to face up to it.” 

She starts repeatedly flicking the edges of the file on the table between them with her thumb, a ragged, nervous gesture. 

“Roberts knew Jackson when they were kids. It took some digging while I was down there for the trial. I knew that they were connected in some way. Turned out that both of them used to go to the same summer camp every year. They were friends. I don’t think they’d seen each other in years, but who knows. My partner made fun of me trying to establish a connection between them, laughed at my ‘female intuition’ getting in the way of the facts. I was young, trying to prove myself. He was older and experienced. So I let it go.” 

“He sounds like an asshole.”

“Jack died a couple of years later. A heart attack at the age of forty seven.”

“Sorry,” Dean says, feeling like he’d said the wrong thing. A partnership between murder detectives was like a marriage. They saw each other more than they did their own families. 

Harvelle gives him a small, tight smile. “He smoked, drank and had a vicious temper. Smacked his wife around. She used the insurance money to go on a cruise and met a retired salesman. They live in Florida. We still send each other Christmas cards.” She rubs the back of her neck tiredly. “Tell me about the caretaker.”

Dean tells her what he knows about Cyrus Matthews.

“Put a detail on him and see if you can get anything off the street cameras near the school and alley where the body was found. Now that we know what we’re looking for maybe something will make better sense.”

Dean remains silent for a minute. None of it makes any sense. There is no rational, logical reason to connect Cyrus Matthews to Daisy’s murder. There’s something completely off about the whole thing. Copycat killing is about the media attention, not about random connections between the killers. 

Eventually he tells her what his gut instinct is suggesting to him. “Matthews drives a station wagon. There was a canvas tarp in the back that I’d really like forensics to get a closer look at. If he is our guy, the basement at the school is probably where he killed Daisy and the station wagon is how he got her body out of there. I need a search warrant for the room and vehicle but there isn’t a judge in the city who is going to give us a warrant based on this. It sounds like wild and crazy conjecture at best.” 

“Leave the warrants to me. I know a judge who — let’s just say he owes me. We can work our way backwards on the paperwork before it goes to trial.” 

Dean covers his surprise. Harvelle is the straightest cop he’s ever met. “I don’t even want to know how you can get a warrant with just a click of your fingers,” he says with a dirty leer.

“Fuck you, Winchester,” she replies coldly. “Despite rumor to the contrary, I didn’t get to where I am by sucking dick. Should we just wait around until another body turns up with the garbage? Do you want that on your conscience?” 

He flinches at the sharpness of her tone and stands up. “Fine, I’m on it.” 

“Dean,” her voice is quieter. “I can’t let another child die. I’ve been carrying this for a long time.”

“I hear you, Captain.”

 

***  
Everything is in place. A detail has been assigned to follow Cyrus Matthews and they’re just waiting for the warrants to come through from the judge that Harvelle has in her pocket before they move on him. 

Dean leaves the precinct early. Patience has never been his strong suit and the way that Harvelle and Henriksen share shifty looks with him as they pass each other in the corridors, like they’re part of some conspiracy, starts to drive him crazy.

Punching the shit out of the bag at the gym helps to get rid of some of his pent-up frustration, but he’s still feeling wired and buzzing with some strange energy that makes his skin feel prickly when he gets to Sam’s apartment. 

Sam’s doing his weekly sleep-in shift at the homeless shelter so Dean has the apartment to himself and phones for a pizza, an indulgence allowed by Sam’s absence. Sam’s an arrogantly good cook, a health nut, and is condescending as hell about junk food.

Dean’s got all the case files arranged on the large oak table in the living-room, the crime scene photographs laid out in a grim display at the center, when he realizes that there’s no beer in the fridge. 

He’s back at the apartment fifteen minutes later, a six-pack under his arm and a piece of jerky in the corner of his mouth. 

When he opens the apartment door, he’s surprised to see Sam with his back to him over at the table. 

“Hey. I thought you were at the shelter tonight,” he says, hanging his keys on the erect wooden cock of some fertility carving that Ginnie got Sam from fuck knows where during one of her recent expeditions. 

His comment is met with silence. He turns around to see that Sam hasn’t moved. 

“Sam?” 

Sam doesn’t answer, doesn’t even acknowledge Dean’s presence. 

Dean notices little things in quick succession about Sam’s body language that he didn’t see at first glance: he’s hunched over, rigidly holding onto the table, knuckles white and body trembling slightly.

“Sam!” 

No response.

Dean drops the six-pack on the hallway table, spits out the jerky and quickly moves over to Sam’s side. He has to physically unclench Sam’s hands from the table’s edge so that he can turn him around to get a look at his face. Dean’s heart skips a beat when he sees that Sam’s skin is completely drained of color, an expression of nameless horror written across his features, his eyes glazed over like he’s looking at something other than what’s right in front of him.

“Sam! What is it? What’s wrong?” Panic rears up inside him.

Sam starts to mumble something, a frightened, incoherent string of repeated sounds, his gaze still unfocused and faraway.

“Sam! Snap out of it. Come back. I’m here.” Dean shakes him roughly, realizes what he’s doing and gentles his hands, starts rubbing up and down Sam’s arms, up to his shoulders, massaging the clenched muscle, up into his hair, stroking, pulling Sam close to kiss him. “I’m here. I’m right here,” he repeats against Sam’s cold lips. 

Sam pulls back and his eyes slowly clear of the invisible curtain between him and the real world. He looks confused, focuses briefly on Dean before his face contorts into an expression of intense physical pain. He jerks his hand up to his forehead, kneading hard, pinches the bridge of his nose, swaying slightly. Letting out a long, hurt groan, he starts to fall over. Dean can only hold on, trying to support Sam’s weight as they collapse to their knees. 

“It’s okay,” Dean soothes, crouched in front of Sam, one hand firm and supportive on his back, holding him upright, his other hand at the base of Sam’s skull and rubbing in small circles. His gentle, hushing sounds counter Sam’s groans of pain and low murmurs that start to take shape into words. Darkness. So much darkness. Empty. Cold. So cold.

Eventually, Dean manages to get Sam up and steers him over to the couch. He gets a blanket and wraps it around Sam’s shivering frame, goes into the kitchen to make him a cup of the herbal tea that he likes. Dean talks to him the whole time, tells Sam what he’s doing, where he is, complains that the tea smells like mothballs.

He returns to the living room and sits close to Sam on the couch, watching him sip the tea with shaky hands. Dean can see that he’s slowly returning to himself like he’s been away and needs some reorientation. 

“I’m sorry.”

It’s a ridiculous thing to say and Dean doesn’t know why Sam says it. He briefly glances over at the visual horror spread out on the table and knows that he should be the one apologizing. He brought that into Sam’s home, this warm, safe place, eccentrically filled with Ginnie’s love for Sam. 

It was always going to come to this. At some point he was going to have to deal with Sam’s visions, face them head-on and be there for Sam when he needed him. He just never thought that triggering Sam’s psychic thing would be his fault. 

He leans over and pulls Sam closer by the edges of the blanket wrapped around him. “For a smart person, you say really stupid things sometimes.” He presses his lips to Sam’s, thankfully warm and responsive, the smell of mothballs aside. “You have nothing to be sorry for. I’m sorry. What happened?” he asks gently.

“I don’t know. It was a vision, but it’s never been like that before.” Sam leans back and pulls the blanket closer around him. Vulnerability isn’t something that Dean associates with Sam. He’s too big, takes up too much space, both physically and metaphorically. You can’t miss him in a crowded room, can’t have a half-hearted response to who he is as a person. Sam looks reduced somehow, less. It scares Dean and makes him feel fiercely, angrily protective.

“When I’ve had the visions before, I could feel the person that I cared about who was in trouble, their pain and fear. I had this intense connection with my dad when he died, you know?” 

Dean nods, allows him to talk, even though he doesn’t understand, not really. 

“I could feel him reaching out for me,” Sam continues. “I was the last thing that he was thinking about. With Lily I could feel her desperate clinging to life right up to the end. But in the background I was aware of this rage, this jealousy, this sureness that she deserved to die. It gets all mixed up together.” 

He looks at Dean with bruised eyes. “When you were being hurt, I could sense your bravado, this shell of pretence that you weren’t afraid. And then it was like we were swimming together underwater, me and you, all this light piercing through the water. I didn’t think that they were going to be on time. I thought I was going to lose you when I’d only just discovered you. But I could also feel his hatred, Dean. I felt how dirty and offensive you were to him. It was so ugly.”

They’ve spoken about it before but not like this. Dean feels split open, revealed. “That’s what I was thinking about when I was losing consciousness, about swimming in the river out at this place that my dad used to take me to in the summer when I was a kid. And you were there. I wasn’t scared, seriously I wasn’t, not at the end when I thought that I was dying, just before Henriksen came busting through the door. I felt strangely safe.” 

“I know,” Sam says quietly. He shivers suddenly and pulls the blanket tighter around himself.

“What did you see?” Dean asks, nodding his head towards the table.

“It’s not really visual, not about seeing things. It’s more like feelings, weird and dream-like, fragmentary. I remember coming home and going over to the table, seeing those horrible, cold photographs and feeling angry at you for leaving them lying around, and then I just felt clutched by something, like it was trying to drag me down into this deep, black, empty hole. I couldn’t breathe.”

He starts shivering again. 

Dean squeezes his thigh, keeps his hand there, trying to settle the tremors moving through Sam’s body. “It’s okay. We don’t need to talk about it now. I’ll—”

Sam suddenly grabs his hand, gripping his fingers painfully. “Dean, he feels nothing, not for any of those kids. There’s no violence, no anger, just this…this mild satisfaction. It’s inhuman. God, all those children, just left there in that basement, alone in the woods, that boy in the bath and the little girl thrown away like garbage.”

“They’re different cases, Sam. Different killers.” 

“No!” Sam shakes his head violently, almost crushing Dean’s fingers in his hand. “No, it’s the same guy. It is. I could feel him. But—”

“But what?” Dean asks, sensing that he already knows the answer. 

This frightened look crosses Sam’s face. “It didn’t feel like a person. It felt like something else. Something not human. This presence.”

It’s like he’s been waiting for Sam to say those exact words, waiting for him to verbalize all the lurking sub-text beneath Harvelle’s revelations and her skittish refusal to state things outright. Even Henriksen’s characteristic bluntness has been muddied all day with half-statements and suggestions. In every conversation they had today the three of them had tentatively talked around the edges of this unnamed, but understood, thing. The words just don’t exist in their vocabulary. 

Dean gets up and starts pacing alongside the couch, ignoring the look on Sam’s upturned face. 

“What the fuck does that mean? Not human—what does that mean?”

“Dean.”

He continues pacing and running his hand through his hair. He can’t deal with this. This shit does not belong in his world. It might be true, might be real, but only out there, somewhere else. It’s hard enough having to deal with Sam’s visions. Now it’s infecting his work. What would his father say, him contemplating this? It’s laughable. Ridiculous. 

And he could see that same craziness in Harvelle and Henriksen today. 

Henriksen, his down to earth, straight-talking partner who doesn’t watch horror movies because the fear that they evoke is artificial and contrived, who shuddered when Dean told him about the two guards killing their kids, said nothing, gave Dean this long, strange and accepting look before walking away and pulling two detectives off one of their biggest cases and assigning them to follow Matthews. Henriksen didn’t even comment on the practically illegal warrants for Matthews’ office and vehicle.

Henriksen is never silent. He’s the most opinionated person Dean has ever met. 

The world has been turned upside down. 

Sam reaches out a hand and tugs him onto the couch. Dean collapses next to him, his head back, directing his voice harshly at the ceiling. “You know what we have to do, right?”

“What?”

“We have to call that bible salesman of an ex-boyfriend of yours. He knows about this shit, right?”

The color has returned to Sam’s face. His expression loses some of its vulnerability and hardens a little. “Castiel’s very well-respected in his field, Dean.” He gets up and looks around, seems momentarily confused and a little unsteady on his feet. “I don’t know what I’ve done with my phone,” he says, sounding embarrassed.

Dean hauls himself up and picks up Sam’s phone from underneath the table. 

Sam goes into the kitchen to call Castiel. 

He’s also emotionally handicapped and short, Dean thinks uncharitably, irritated by Sam’s need to leave the room to call Castiel. What does Sam need to say to Castiel that he can’t say in front of him? 

He gets the six-pack from the hallway table and downs two beers back-to-back. 

 

***  
It takes less than forty minutes for Castiel to arrive at the apartment. There’s a shadow of stubble along his jaw, his hair’s all mussed up and his tie hangs loose and open. Even Dean has to admit that there’s something kinda coolly sexy about the way that he carries the dishevelled intellectual look. 

Whatever Sam said to Castiel over the phone obviously has him worried because he pulls Sam into a hard hug as soon as he opens the apartment door. Dean watches Sam briefly relax into the embrace. 

Dean can’t feel irritated by their casual familiarity with each other because Castiel comes over to him next and lightly squeezes his arm in a surprisingly supportive gesture that is completely disarming.

Castiel looks over at the table and flinches when he sees the crime scene photographs. “It takes a very singular sort of person to have to deal with that every day,” he says to Dean, something that might be respect and maybe curiosity in his voice.

“Somebody has to do it,” Dean replies, not saying that he wasn’t ever really given the choice, that he was raised to do it, that John Winchester would never have allowed any other life for his son. 

Castiel sits down at the table. “Tell me,” he says, looking up at Dean and then lowering his eyes to wander over the case files.

They sit down opposite Castiel and Dean tells him, explains the illogical connections, the uncanny similarities, explains the web that connects these apparently ordinary men.

Castiel listens, calm and attentive, asks for the occasional clarification, his questions perceptive and to the point. Then he just sits there staring at the photographs.

Eventually, he looks up at Sam. “So your premonitory visions are not just about the people that you’re connected to, that you have a relationship with? This is something else.”

“Looks that way.” Sam runs his hand through his hair, a tired, vulnerable gesture that makes Dean want to hide him away from this thing that he has no control over.

Castiel looks back at the photographs, then murmurs, “Der Kindestod.”

“In English?”

Castiel looks up at Dean. “It translates as the child’s death. This is the work of a demon. There are a number of documented cases of people possessed by a demon suffocating or drowning children in this serialised manner. A priest during the German Reformation collected some of the earliest recorded evidence of it and called the demon Der Kindestod. He explains its motivations in the context of taking life breath, Prana or Qi as it’s called in the East.” 

“Yes, that’s exactly what it is. It’s about stealing breath, about Qi and the pure life-force of a child.”

Sam gets this remembering, glassy look as he says it. Dean grips his thigh hard under the table to keep him in the here and now.

Sam shakes his head and tries to refocus his vision but there’s some lingering absence of himself at the back of his eyes when he looks at Dean. “I’m fine,” he says, meshing his fingers with Dean’s. “I am,” he repeats at Dean’s disbelieving expression.

Dean holds on to his hand under the table, doesn’t allow Sam to let go, less about being comforting than about trying to be a heavy anchor holding Sam at his side. 

“So you’re saying that demons can ride a human being like a meat-suit, that they’re able to jump from one person to another and that they get extra hell points for murdering kids?”

“If you want to put it that way.”

“How does it move from one person to another?” Sam asks.

Castiel shrugs. “It’s unclear. Probably through physical proximity. Some people are more susceptible to possession than others. The demon is more comfortable in certain vessels. It’s comparable to a skin-graft or organ transplant. Sometimes it doesn’t take very well. That’s probably what happened with the guards who killed their own children. Those are messy and uncontrolled killings, too close to home. The demon couldn’t take full possession of those men. It was taking a vacation—if I can put it that way—from its preferred vessel, this other man, Jonathan Roberts. It was a temporary gratification.” 

“A vacation? Temporary gratification? You’re talking about a four year old kid held underwater in the bathtub by his own father until he fucking drowned!” 

“No, Dean, that’s not what I’m talking about. You understand that he’s innocent? They all are. Including the man who was executed. This caretaker at the school, he has no volition, no control over the physical actions that his body performs. And he’s still in there, probably still conscious and aware. He’s trapped in the prison of his own body.” 

“Jesus!” Dean gets up and starts pacing again. “What am I supposed to do with that? I have to serve warrants to search what is probably the murder scene and the guy’s vehicle. If we find evidence, and we will find it, I know that in my gut, then we’re going to arrest him and it will go to trial. He’s not going to get off. Demon possession is hardly mitigating evidence in a court of law.”

A look passes between Sam and Castiel.

“Sit down, Dean.” 

Dean has a Pavlovian response when Sam uses that tone, firm and quiet, no room for argument. He sinks back into his chair. “Okay,” he says, leaning forward and meeting Castiel’s eyes. “I believe you. Cyrus Matthews is possessed by a demon. He’s not responsible for his actions, so tell me what I need to do. As a cop, what the hell am I supposed to do?”

Castiel looks back at him intently. “I know a man, a priest, here in New York. He’s experienced in these matters. He can exorcise the demon, but he will need your help. It needs to happen somewhere private, at the caretaker’s home perhaps, and he will need to be physically restrained during the exorcism.”

“Oh, that’s fucking great. Breaking and entering on top of all the other laws and codes that I’ll be violating.”

“It’s the only way that this can end,” Sam says quietly next to him.

“Sam’s right. As you’re obviously aware, prison cannot contain this evil. The demon will escape and more children will die. An exorcism is the only solution.” 

Dean expels an exhausted, resigned breath. “Fine. Get hold of your priest and set it up. I’ll deal with everything on my end. Call me first thing tomorrow.”

Castiel hears the dismissal in his voice, nods and gets to his feet. “I’m sorry that you’ve been placed in such a difficult position. You’re doing the right thing.”

Dean snorts loudly. “I’m risking my career and breaking every rule that’s ever been instilled in me but as long as I’m doing the right thing.”

Castiel doesn’t reply, just gives him a sympathetic look. Sam walks him to the door and they share a quiet conversation out of Dean’s hearing.

He needs to deal with Harvelle and Henriksen tonight. It can’t wait. He’s just getting off his phone when Sam comes back into the room. 

“I have to go out. Henriksen is picking me up outside and we’re going over to Harvelle’s apartment.” 

Sam nods. “Okay. Do you want me to come with you?”

“No, I need to do this on my own.”

He pulls on his jacket and gives Sam a hard, fierce kiss that makes Sam struggle for breath before he starts to reciprocate, bruising Dean’s mouth in a way that speaks volumes about his own pent-up emotions.

Dean pulls away and rubs his finger along Sam’s reddened lower lip. He leans forward and briefly presses a softer kiss to his mouth. “I need to go.”

Sam nods.

When Dean turns to look at him from the doorway, Sam’s wearing a strange, unhappy expression. He doesn’t have time to try and figure out what it means. 

 

***  
On the way over to Harvelle’s place, Dean gives Henriksen a brief run-down of the night’s events, waiting for his partner to cut in and tell him that he has finally lost his mind. But Henriksen remains silent and subdued, seemingly absorbed in driving.

“So when are you going to tell me that I’m completely nuts and that there’s no way I can do this?”

Henriksen seems to be genuinely mulling over his question. Eventually, he glances over at Dean. “Did you read the psych file that came through this afternoon on the first guard who drowned his son in the bath?”

“No, I didn’t get around to it. I got a little distracted tonight.” There’s an understatement. “Why?”

“There’s some really strange shit in it. Sounds like the guy’s pretty much a zombie most of the time but he has these lucid periods—if that’s what you can call them—when he spouts all this rambling stuff about whispering voices in the dark and talks about a sleeping snake inside him. He says that when the snake wakes up, it grows, fills him up and takes control of his body. The psychiatrist calls it a disassociative reaction, like he’s trying to separate himself from what he did. I guess that’s the rational, medical explanation for it. He also talks about Jonathan Roberts, says that Roberts’ eyes used to turn black because he had the devil living in him. Weird shit. The stuff of nightmares. Supposedly he talks to his son all the time, too. Cries and begs for forgiveness.”

“Jesus, can you imagine having to live with that?”

Henriksen’s profile is like granite in the flickering fluorescent lights from the passing storefronts. “No, I can’t. The other guard made the right choice. That’s the only decision a father could make.” 

Dean considers it for a couple of minutes and comes to the same conclusion. 

“This thing has me turned upside down, Vic. What if we’re wrong about Matthews? What if Daisy’s murder is completely unconnected? What if it’s just some random coincidence? Maybe Sam’s got it wrong. Seriously, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. Normally, when I’ve worked out what’s going on with a case, I get this clarity, like it’s all laid out in a straight line in front of me. I can see the patterns and connections. It’s exhilarating. You know what it’s like.” He doesn’t need to turn his head to see Henriksen nod. “This is not how we work. It’s not what we do. I feel like I am losing my fucking mind.” 

“You know what I think?” 

Dean recognizes Henriksen’s serious, philosophical voice. It normally takes at least half a bottle of whiskey to bring it out. 

“I think that the world can be a weird and unknowable place sometimes, and that a man who refuses to accept that and tries to impose his will on things that he can’t control is living a lie.”

“Thanks for that, Yoda. If I am finally going insane, at least I’m in good company.”

Henriksen snorts. “I refuse to be lumped in the same category with you, Winchester. I’m completely sane and remarkably well-balanced considering the shit that I have to deal with on a daily basis. You, on the other hand, are obviously a madman. I decided that the first time I met you. But you’re also a really good cop with sound instincts. If you believe that this is true, Dean, if you trust it, then I’m behind you the whole way. You know the line: once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. It fits.”

“Fuck, Vic, did you actually just quote Sherlock Holmes at me?”

Henriksen ignores him and asks, “Do you trust this Castiel guy?”

A slow-moving silence makes its way between them. Eventually, Dean answers, “Sam does.”

He can feel Henriksen’s eyes on him. 

“Did I ever tell you that my grandmother had second sight?”

Henriksen’s eyes are back on the road when Dean looks over at him. “Seriously?”

“As kids we were terrified of her and couldn’t get away with anything when she was around.”

Dean laughs. “You and Sam should get together and talk about it.”

“We have.”

“What? When?”

“A couple of weeks back. We went for coffee.”

“You and Sam went for coffee? Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t he tell me?” 

“It wasn’t anything. We went for coffee. We talked, got to know each other better.”

“What did you talk about?”

Henriksen doesn’t answer.

“Should I be worried? You been sneaking around behind my back with my man, Partner?”

“Dean, we’ve known each other for a while now, right? I’m married to the person who pretty much epitomises my taste: five foot two, a C cup, smells like flowers, the mother of my child. Anyway, Sam doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who’d be fucking around behind your back. I thought you were supposed to be good at reading people.”

Dean doesn’t pursue it because they’re pulling into the underground parking lot of Harvelle’s building. It’s not a big deal. He should be happy that the two people he cares about most are spending time together. He can’t help feeling a little uneasy, though, that neither of them told him about it, and wonders how often his name came up in this getting-to-know-you-better session.

They don’t talk in the elevator up to Harvelle’s apartment. Dean turns his mind away from worrying thoughts about Sam’s need to talk to people other than him about his visions and starts mentally rehearsing how he’s going to present what Castiel told him to Harvelle. 

Harvelle’s apartment surprised him the first time he saw it. Like her, it’s pragmatic and uncluttered, but there’s also a feminine, old-fashioned charm to the carefully chosen pieces of antique furniture, the vase of flowers on a table and the photographs that line the mantelpiece, including one of him, Jo and Gabe taken a couple of months after Gabe was born, when things were still new and hopeful for their little family. 

Harvelle didn’t sound surprised over the phone to hear from him. When he told her that he needed to discuss the case with her, she’d invited him over without asking any more questions. 

Dean tells her about Sam’s vision and explains why an exorcism, rather than an arrest, is the only ethical, logical option open to them. He’s only halfway through what he wants to say when she gets up and starts pacing, thrumming her fingers against her thighs and nodding her head. Her immediate acceptance makes him think that she’d already come to the demon conclusion and that there might be something else she isn’t telling them. 

They try to encourage her to stay out of the exorcism so that she can maintain plausible deniability if the shit hits the fan, but she threatens to fire them both if it goes down without her. They know that she means it too.

In a way it’s a relief to finally have everything out in the open. At least the three of them are now on the same page and speaking the same language. They make arrangements and discuss the details of what they’re going to do, like they would with any other case, except nobody laughs at the idea of the perp being possessed and at getting help from a demon-fighting priest. 

 

***  
When Dean gets back to the apartment, it’s well past midnight. Sam is still up, waiting for him, just sitting there on the couch, a single lamp keeping the darkness at bay.

“How did it go?” he asks when Dean sits down next to him.

“Surprisingly well. They’re both on board with the exorcism. Next thing we’ll be getting a resident psychic and exorcist at the precinct. It’s a whole new method of policing. One that’s sure to catch on and eventually get implemented as a national model. Hey, you interested? If you ever wanted to get out of the book-selling business there could be a whole new career path open to you in law-enforcement.”

He means it as a joke and frowns when that same unhappy look from earlier crosses Sam’s face. 

“I’m sorry, Dean. I am.” 

A sense of foreboding starts to loom in his periphery, like there’s something there in the corner of his eye that’s he been aware of but hasn’t fully considered.

“What are you apologizing for?” 

“I know that I complicate your life, that this thing I have makes me difficult to be with. There aren’t many people who could handle it. If you wanted to leave, I’d understand, and maybe it’d be the best thing. The longer this goes on, the harder it’ll be to break it off. I don’t want you to stay because you feel obligated because I saved your life. There’s no debt here. You don’t owe me anything.”

It takes a while for Sam’s words to process. When they do, icy fear starts to crystallize in his veins. “Are you asking me to leave?” 

“No. Yes. I don’t know. I can’t change what I am, Dean. The visions are a part of me and you can’t seem to accept that.”

That cold, numb feeling continues its way outwards and starts to cover his skin. Dean realizes that he’s sitting so still he feels frozen in place. He shifts on the couch and unclenches his hands, which are starting to stiffen painfully. 

The thing is that it has crossed his mind, the thought that he’s here because he feels obligated. He had a choice, of course he did. He didn’t have to come to Sam after getting out of the hospital. But how much choice is involved when you owe your life to someone else? 

But the other undeniable thing is that the future looks like a bleak, empty place whenever he considers walking out the door. It’s not just about Sam saving his life, not just about the intense, addictive sexual connection between them. There’s something in Sam that balances something inside him. He likes himself better when he’s around Sam. He feels more content, more whole. 

He turns to face Sam. “I’ve gotta be honest, I’m struggling with this. I really am. And sometimes I feel like I just can’t give you what you need. You always want to talk about stuff but I don’t know how to do that. I haven’t had any practice at it. Even though Castiel has that whole emotionally detached thing going on, he still speaks the same language that you do. You come from the same world. I’m just a flatfoot cop. It’s all I’ve ever known. I don’t know how to eat at fancy French restaurants or how to talk about books. And I seriously don’t know how to deal with your visions. I’m terrified by this exorcism thing.”

Sam’s fingers twitch next to him like he wants to reach out and touch Dean but is holding himself back. He’s pale and there’s a sad heaviness around his mouth that Dean’s never seen there before.

“I just know that I don’t want to turn out like my dad. And I’m already pretty far along that road as it is. If I leave right now, I don’t think that I could find my way back to any other place.” 

“What do you mean? I don’t understand this hold that your father has over you. You never talk about him.” 

He doesn’t talk about his dad because it’s too difficult. Dean resigns himself to the unavoidable, but, actually, as soon as he opens his mouth to speak, it’s like this burden on his shoulders starts to lift.

“After my mom’s murder, he became obsessed. He was always single-minded but I think that he saw her killer in every case that he investigated after that. Man, he was relentless on the job. Everything was black and white for him. He has this legendary status at the precinct. John fucking Winchester. People still talk about him all the time, measure me against him.”

“That must be hard for you. He sounds like a difficult, complex man.” 

“You have no idea. And he was impossible to get to know. After what happened with my mom, he just cut himself off from other people, from me. He idealised her and their marriage became this perfect thing in his head, but I don’t think that it was. He didn’t allow himself to grieve, to show weakness, and it just ate away at him for years afterwards. He couldn’t move on from it. You think I have issues with being open about my feelings? My dad was a master at playing the strong, silent type. He’d take me to games and occasionally do stuff with me, sure, but it felt like he was just playing another role. Give Deano a couple of hours of my time, do the dad thing to keep him happy, to keep up the appearance of normality. But he wasn’t ever really there with me.” 

“You’re not him, Dean, and you don’t need me to make you realize that.”

“Maybe not, but I want you. I don’t want to lose you because I’m so wrapped up in shit that is less important.” The truth of it hits him as he says it.

“Then you have to let me in, at least a little, and especially with the big stuff. I need to know what you’re thinking and feeling sometimes.”

“Yeah, I get it. It’s not like you’re psychic or anything.”

“Dean, don’t. Don’t turn everything into a punch-line.”

“Sorry. The counsellor at the precinct calls it my go-to defence mechanism. I really am sorry that I don’t always listen or try to understand. I do accept that the psychic thing is part of who you are. You’re complicated. I like that about you. This is about me fucking up, because that’s what I do. I’m not sure that I actually know how to love somebody else. I don’t even know how to love my own kid. But I’m not leaving, Sam, I can’t.” 

Jesus, this is difficult. He feels like he’s going to start crying. “I can try harder. I can be better.” 

Sam moves forward suddenly and puts his hand over Dean’s mouth to stop the words tumbling out. He tucks his other hand behind Dean’s neck and pulls him forward so that Dean sprawls over him and wraps his legs tightly around Dean’s body. 

Sam gives him this intense, burning look, removes his hand from Dean’s mouth and kisses him hard, his lips clamped so tight over Dean’s that he can’t breathe.

“I thought you wanted me to talk,” he says breathlessly against Sam’s mouth when Sam finally eases up a little.

“I do,” Sam replies, nuzzling into his neck. “I really do. You have no idea what it does to me to finally hear you revealing parts of yourself like this. But I’ve been sitting here for hours, torturing myself and now I’m just so tired. I don’t want you to leave. I want you to hold me and to fuck me and I don’t want to think about anything else.”

Relief floods through him. “That can definitely be arranged.” He pulls Sam’s leg up so that he can settle closer against him. “You’re a freak, you know. I think emotional intimacy and me on the verge of tears actually turns you on.”

“I hate to see you hurting, Dean,” Sam says with a frown, then that slow, deep-dimple smile appears, the vestiges of unhappiness in his expression thankfully erased by it. “But, yeah, pretty much everything about you turns me on. Sometimes I’ll be in the bookstore, talking to someone about a recent poetry collection or what’s on at the theatre when I’ll suddenly think about you and get a hard-on. It’s embarrassing. There’s squirming and blushing and all kinds of humiliations.” He starts to unbutton Dean’s shirt. 

Dean laughs at the visual, sits up and straddles Sam. He shrugs out of his shirt and throws it somewhere behind him. “Yeah. Ditto. Except without the plays and poetry. I’ll be in the morgue talking about fingernail scrapings and stomach contents when the same thing happens to me.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Sam replies as he unbuckles Dean’s belt. “You’re a closet romantic, Winchester.” 

Sam pulls hard at the end of the belt and it slithers through the loopholes of Dean’s pants, a quick and heated friction around his waist. The buckle hits something glass or ceramic when Sam throws it across the room. Both of them grin at the sound of it shattering. Sam trails his hand slowly down Dean’s chest, dips a finger into the pool of his navel, rubs his thumb along the ridge of his hip and strokes the hardening length jutting against Dean’s pants. 

“That’s true,” Dean says hoarsely, watching Sam’s hand. “And something that very few people actually realize about me.” He pulls Sam forward so that he can tug off his t-shirt. “Hey, once this thing with Cyrus Matthews is done, and supposing I don’t end up being held up on charges or something, do you want to go on a road-trip, get away for a while?”

Sam doesn’t respond right away. His eyes are half-closed, head thrown back over the arm of the couch. He pushes Dean’s hands away from where they’re pinching his nipples and takes a couple of deep, steadying breaths, looking up at Dean. “That sounds great, but how about we just start with going away for a weekend first? Take Gabe with us. You said Jo suggested it, right? We can do something manly, maybe go camping and fishing.”

Dean grins and goes back to playing with his nipples. “Yeah, there’s nothing like male bonding around a campfire. But I think Gabe might be too small to go fishing.”

Sam unzips Dean’s fly and pushes his pants and underwear lower. “In the immortal words of my Great Uncle Walt, a boy is never too young to learn the art of fishing.”

Dean laughs as he lifts himself up and squeezes next to Sam on the couch, kicking off his pants. He strips Sam of his jeans and runs his tongue up Sam’s side, across his chest, circling both nipples, up his throat and then whispers in his ear, “I don’t believe that you ever had a Great Uncle Walt or that you even know how to fish.”

“There are a lot of things that you don’t know about me,” Sam says and pulls Dean close.

They don’t talk much after that. Dean pretty much loses all capacity for rational thought as he pushes into Sam’s body and gets lost in all that intense heat and consuming love. 

***  
Things don’t go quite as they planned. When do they ever?

They end up having to arrest Matthews the next day when he abducts a little girl who got separated from her mother in an over-crowded shopping mall.

Harvelle gives the go-ahead for the two detectives shadowing him to bust through the door after they follow him home from the mall. They find the girl, tied up and terrified in a spare bedroom. Matthews is cold and unemotional when they arrest him. It’s a demeanour that he maintains when he’s interviewed afterwards. He refuses to answer any of their questions. For them, the whole thing is a farce because they’re painfully aware that the interviews are being observed and recorded. They can’t ask the questions that they really want to. 

Getting Castiel’s priest into the holding cell to see Matthews after his lawyer leaves late on the day that he is arrested is easy enough. They simply explain that Matthews has requested religious succour. Turns out that it’s equally easy to ensure that they aren’t interrupted. Dean is surprised at how good Harvelle is at lying. 

The exorcism itself is surreal. When Matthews realizes what they’re actually there for, all pretence ends and the demon reveals itself. Blackness like wet ink swirls through his eyes, solidifies and turns them into obsidian marbles, cold and hard. There’s a slight change to the tone of his voice that creepily reminds Dean of a ventriloquist’s dummy. It’s completely bizarre to look at someone and feel as if they’re empty, and then to get the sense that there’s something else in there inhabiting this vacant body. 

The priest encourages them not to interact with the demon, not to question or to try to understand it. He prays over them before they go into the holding cell and makes them wear rosaries.

Matthews struggles hard and it takes the three of them to cuff his wrists and ankles to the cot. It gets a little rough and when the demon calls Harvelle a whore and threatens to jam his fist up her cunt in an utterly cool and unemotional voice, Dean loses it and elbows him hard in the face, splitting his lip.

Harvelle calls him an idiot, reminds him that they’re not supposed to be there and that it’s impossible for cops in this day and age to get away with beating up suspects in custody.

Once they have Mathews secured, the priest pulls out a bottle and sprinkles holy water on his forehead. It makes him scream. Henriksen, ever the organised Boy Scout, pulls out some duct tape from his pocket, tears off a strip and tries to cover Mathews’ mouth. The priest pulls him back and shakes his head. He holds up a crucifix and starts chanting in Latin in this deep, authoritative voice. After a couple of minutes, a huge lump blisters up under the skin of Matthews’ throat like a weird, quick growing goiter. The priest traces the sign of the cross over it and splashes it with holy water. Matthews starts shrieking and growling like a wild animal. He opens his mouth and a column of roiling black smoke erupts from his throat. 

It is the single weirdest, most terrifying thing that Dean has ever seen in his entire life.

Afterwards, Matthews is barely conscious. His skin turns a sallow yellow color and his breathing becomes shallow and uneven. They call the medics and Harvelle concocts this story about him having something that looked like an epileptic fit. He goes into the hospital and never fully recovers. Later, when they do a scan, his brain is covered in lesions that the doctors can’t explain. 

They find hair, fibres and some blood in both the basement office at the school and Matthews’ station wagon that are a match for Daisy. So at least Daisy’s parents get some level of closure. It isn’t worth much, but if things had gone down differently they might not even have had that.

Matthews ends up in a medium security psychiatric institution. He has no family and nobody questions how this ordinary, functioning person ended up being charged with murder and in a semi-conscious state in the nuthouse. 

Dean can’t help himself and goes to see him. 

Winter is just turning into the sunny new green of spring and Matthews is sitting outside in a garden chair, his head lolling and dribble leaking from the corner of his mouth, barely aware of Dean’s presence. It’s like he’s been chewed up from the inside. Dean can’t even imagine who this man might have been before his body got hijacked by a demon. There’s just nothing there anymore. 

 

***  
After the exorcism, after the medics took Matthews away, and after they had their own personal freak-outs in private, they met at the front desk, an unspoken fear and camaraderie drawing them together.

Henriksen refused a drink, said that he was going home to his family and told Harvelle not expect him at work for at least a couple of days.

Dean followed Harvelle to her office and snorted when she pulled out a bottle of Wild Turkey from her desk drawer.

“Way to perpetuate the stereotype, Captain,” he said.

“Shut up. Do you want a drink or not?”

He grinned and nodded, sat down opposite her and turned to the window to look out at the darkening city.

“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

“What?” he asked.

She handed him a glass of whiskey and stood next to him, looking out the window. “How much of this happens out there and how many cases we think we’ve closed when there might’ve been something else going on.”

“Yeah,” he replied, feeling the whiskey slipping down his throat to pool warmth in his stomach.

She stood like that for a while. He had a feeling that it was habitual, something that helped her to think.

The shadows in the room lengthened and she sat down, switching on a lamp on her desk. It settled an island of light around them, the rest of the room lost in a sea of shadow.

“How are we supposed to do the job, to fight against it when it might not be what we think it is?”

It’s the same question that he’d been asking himself. “Like we always do, I guess. One case at a time.” 

“Bullshit answer, Dean.” 

She sighed, poured them another drink and they sat in silence watching the city shake off her day face and prepare for the night.

He couldn’t give her answers that he didn’t know. He looked over at her. She was so tough and immutable, so self-reliant and incredibly alone that it made his chest hurt. “You should get out more, Ellen. Meet somebody. The job can’t be the only thing.”

Her lips quirked in wry humor. “What? Now you’re the expert? I’m not taking dating advice from a Winchester.”

“I’m just saying. He didn’t deserve you, you know.”

“Who?” 

Dean knew that she knew who he was talking about.

Eventually, she answered, “He tried. And he cared about you. As much as he was capable of caring for anyone. Your mother’s murder broke something in him. And when he couldn’t find her killer, the random, inexplicable injustice of it just chipped away at him.” 

“I know.”

“You’re a better cop and a better man, Dean. I know you don’t think so, but you are. You did good with this case. And I’m grateful.”

Her praise made him glow a little. It always did. His arrest record was partly down to him constantly seeking her approval. 

“You’re pretty awesome yourself. But I still think you should be getting out more. On-line dating is really common now, you know? There’s no shame in it.”

“Oh, fuck you, Winchester, and your inability to take a compliment. You always have to get in the final word.”

He grinned and put his feet up on her desk. She gave him a dark look that he countered with a wink and a slowly widening smile that normally worked on anybody with a pulse. But not Harvelle. He put his feet back on the floor. 

“Honestly, I don’t think I even care anymore about trying to be as good a cop as he was. They’re impossible shoes to fill and the old-timers will never allow me to anyway. I’ll always be John’s son, doesn’t matter how hard I fight against it. But I’m trying to do a better job with some of the other stuff. The stuff that he wasn’t very good at. And I meant the compliment. What you’ve done with this precinct is something else. It couldn’t have been easy.”

“It wasn’t.”

Another silence settled between them, easy and companionable, and they had another drink.

She looked over at him. “You seem happier these past months. How are things going with Sam?”

He could tell that she meant it as a serious question without any underlying bitterness or accusation. 

“Good, I think. I’m trying not to fuck it up.”

She lifted her glass. “To love then, Dean.” She paused, considering her next words. “Difficult and imperfect as it can be sometimes, at least it makes life more interesting.”

Dean clinked his glass against hers. “Amen to that, Captain.”


End file.
